Except we did do something about this problem. It was called the PPACA, aka, Obamacare, and made significant improvements to the long-term viability of Medicaid. (For one thing, the medical industry agreed to large cuts in Medicaid and Medicare payments, in return for the government stopping the _massive_ hemorrhaging of cash that unpaid bills were sucking out. The PPACA will greatly reduce those unpaid bills, and there's a bunch of other stuff.)
Talking about Medicaid/Medicare's budget outlook from _2000_ is idiotic, and probably an attempt to be deliberately misleading on your part. Medical spending has, indeed, gone up, but nowhere near enough to explain the current deficit. (In fact, Medicare spending somehow decided to start going down itself starting in 2010, before all this.)
There is exactly three things that have altered, in the negative direction, the budget since we last had it mostly balanced in the late 90s: The wars, the Bush tax cut, and the economic downturn. (And for a while, TARP, but that's almost all paid back now, with interest.)
That's it. That's all the major stuff that changed. Medical expenses going up by whatever amount, and Medicare and Medicaid going up, were tiny changes in comparison. (And part of Medicare going up was the massive giveaway of Medicare D under Bush.)
Now, talking about what 'causes' the deficit is nearly meaningless. Obviously, we could cut any spending that totaled the deficit and balance the budget. But the part that changed since we had it balanced of government policy was the _massive_ tax cuts that reduced revenue and two expensive wars. (And then the economy crashed, but I will be charitable and not include that as a government policy.)
Those two things together add up to about two-thirds the current deficit and the economy is the last third. The amount that Medicaid and Medicare take from the general budget (As opposed to being funded by Medicare premiums.) doesn't come near that, much less the _change_ in them since we had the budget balanced.
But we are talking about a bipartisan plan that was passed and signed by the president because it was the best deal everyone would agree to and would solve the problem.
No, we're talking about a bipartisan plan that was passed and signed by the president because otherwise the Republicans were threatening to run us into the debt ceiling. Again
What I've always found astonishing is that we spend so much money making everything we have in the military portable.
What happened to defending the country? Why don't we have guns and torpedo launchers at important harbors? Why don't we have AA guns along the coast?
Set those two things up, and give them to Canada for their southern east and west coasts, stick some along our southern border, and, presto, invasion has become almost impossible.
An invasion force landing in Mexico to try to invade America would be smashed flat by America, _in Mexico_, as soon as Mexico said 'Uh, guys, we've been invaded and we think you're next. Help please?'. That war might be pretty shitty for Mexico, but we could keep them from reaching the US. Same if someone invades Canada from the top, although there it would be funnier to just cut their supply lines and let them freeze to death.
The US is in an _impossible_ good position against _any_ potential invasion except from Canada. East and west are water, and south is either water or the extreme inhospitable (and cover-less and people-less) terrain of the American southwest. And a Canadian invasion would be suicidal for Canada, so we just need to make sure no one else uses them as a path.
Defend our east and west, give guns to Canada to defend their east and west, and we've basically secured the country, militarily. We're a fuckload safer from invasion than, say, Belgium or Ecuador or any random county with half a dozen neighbors and possible invasion points. It's worth mentioning that _every_ war we've lost any continental American territory during has been with our neighbors. (Or, rather, the European countries that owned our neighbors at the time.)
But no, about the only protected-by-defenses-fortifications in the entire country is Washington. That's it. That (and military bases obviously) are the sole point in this country ready to fend off attacks. Hell, we're letting our highways system (Which is how we move the military around this country) go to crap. We've even crippled the National Guard by shipping them, and their equipment, overseas.
We have our shit spread out all around the world. If we can't put it on the back of a truck and haul it around, or fly it off an aircraft carrier, we don't want it. Everything our military owes is designed to operate in some random environment somewhere else, instead of actually building fortifications here in this country. (Which would be a hell of a lot cheaper.)
No only is our military given vastly more money than it needs, it does not even appear to be completing the _actual_ purpose of a military. I don't actually think an invasion of the country is likely at all, but as the _premise_ of a military is to defend against that (It's why we have the Department of 'Defense', after all), perhaps we should do that _first_.
Christ, this conversation is so funny I don't want to stop it (Hint: At least half the people here are trolls, and trying to make libertarians look like idiots) but I thought I should mention that you cannot write people in on the presidential ballot who have not going to each state and picked electors in that state.
I.e., for a Ron Paul write-in to count, Ron Paul must have sent someone to your state to register X people as electors for him and pay whatever small fee is required for that.(1) This is because you do not actually vote for president, you vote for presidential electors. For a write-in to work, they have to know what _electors_ that write-in has.
Anyone written-in on the presidential ballot that does not have registered electors cannot win, period. Ron Paul cannot win your state, if he has not registered as a write-in in your state, even if he gets 100% of the vote via write-in. (2)
1) Actually, all write-in candidates have to register, so that the election people know _which_ of the millions of people with that name just got elected via write-in. But it _doubly_ requires that for the presidential election...even if the state magically knew which 'Ron Paul' just won the vote, it then has to certify five (or whatever amount your state has) specific real individual people to go cast a vote (presumably for him) at the electoral college.
2) This is not actually true at 100%. If literally 100% of the people voted for Ron Paul, that would result in an election without a winner, aka, a tie, and turn the election over to the state legislature, which could then select whatever electors they wanted...and they presumably would select pro-Ron Paul electors, at least if they wanted to get reelected in their impossibly pro-Ron Paul state. But if _all but one person_ voted for Ron Paul, that other person's choice would win. (And in reality, you would think the other candidates electors would at least vote for themselves on the ballot!)
The space program should be left to those countries that have their environmental, energy, population and human rights problems solved.
You're entirely right, yet exactly wrong.
The space program is not going to solve problems on earth, except by accident.
Although these accidents have happened. As has been pointed out, the space program has been a _huge_ help to environmentalism, and pretty much the only reason we know 95% of the stuff we know. Data about the atmosphere doesn't just magically appear.
And NASA research, I should point out, is also a huge boast to energy...a significant portion of miniaturization, low-power consumption, and battery development comes from NASA research. You can argue private industry has taken a hold of those now, but NASA is the place all that started. The mere existence of NASA research has probably cut our national energy consumption by 0.1%. (Which doesn't sound like much, but more than pays for NASA.)
But the pie-in-the-sky stuff is nonsense. We can't solve the problems of the planet with space travel. So you're right.
But you are completely wrong in that we need to solve other problems. Why? Because the space program doesn't cost anything. Not compared to the problems we need to solve. NASA is completely trivial in the amount of money we spend on it compared to actual problems.
Complaining about how much it costs is about as relevant as someone in a household complaining about how much electricity spent watching TV costs...doesn't everyone know that the car needs a new transmission? Yes, if no one watches TV for, oh, 2000 years, we can buy a new transmission. Or, you know, we could cut the hundreds of dollars a month we spend on buying and training sharks with lasers mounted on their head to defend against imaginary enemies. (Meanwhile, the household watching TV has also taught us many useful things, which hasn't saved a lot of money, but at least make up for the electricity!)
You want to cut the manned mission to Mars? Be aware in four decades you'll be standing in the same place, and this post will also include at the start something like 'And food preservation, NASA's research for manned missions reduces the amount that food spoils before consumption, saving 1% of all food made. (Which doesn't sound like much, but more than pays for NASA.)' or something like that.
tl;dr - NASA is probably a net _gain_ to society, a net gain _to the actual problems you were talking about_, and even if it's not, its cost is so _microscopic_ compared to the money swirling around those problems already that there is no reason to target it even if it accomplishes nothing at all.
I, personally, would argue that considering the gains we've gotten out of NASA, it might even make sense to come up with some new government agencies with other crazy restrictions and demand they figure out ways to do things. 'Without using any steel or iron alloy at all, whatsoever, construct a skyscraper.'
You: *Gives links to articles pointing out that Obama submitted a budget*
You also are apparently unaware that budgets _are not spending bills_. (And hence can be passed in either house first.) Budgets are simply saying _how_ money _will be_ allocated via spending bills, not actually allocate it. The complaint of a budget being a 'loose model' means you have absolutely no idea of how the entire process works. That is how budgets work. It is _spending bills_ that get into specifics, and the _House_ makes those, not the president. (And they are more than one bill, usually. There's a highway spending bill, a defense spending bill, etc, etc, plus an omnibus one that contains a lot of smaller ones.)
The only part of your story that is correct is that, yes, the 2010 Democrat-controlled House did not pass a spending bill for 2011, punting instead to the next congress. That is, indeed, something to be critical of.
The reason no spending bills or budgets have passed _since_ then is that the GOP House keeps coming up with absurd spending budgets and spending bills. They did it for the 2011 spending bill punted to them, and they did it for 2012, and they're currently doing it for 2013. Their spending bills were often so absurd that no Democrats vote for them. (And they are hilariously unable to punt with a continuing resolution this time, thanks to the Sequester that _they_ required of themselves.)
And all this is irrelevant to the fact they won't pass a debt ceiling increase. Regardless of how the money was allocated and spent (And legally there's no different between a new spending bill and the emergency 'We will continue all spending at the levels under the last bill'.), it _was_ allocated and spent, and thus the debt ceiling needed raising. The Republicans once let the government come so close to default that our bond rating was downgraded, and only fixed it after the Bush tax cuts were extended, and then the Republicans did it _again_ (And note the last time they did it they promised that, if the Bush tax cuts were extended, they wouldn't do it again.) by demanding spending cuts...but this time the Democrats managed to get the sequester instead so that the _Republicans_ have to make cuts in their sacred cows also, and the Republicans, predictable, blew up their spending committee and didn't actually manage to come up with any recommendations. (Paul Ryan, hilariously, runs around complaining about all this, hoping no one realizes he's the reason the committee failed. Paul Ryan likes to pretend the committee actually succeeded and made recommendations...it did not.)
Basically, at this point, we're all just hoping that the Republicans lose the House, and someone can actually make _sane_ financial decisions of actually making budgets and spending bills that can get through Congress and doing housekeeping like the debt ceiling without blowing up the country.
Don't fall for their shit . Most of the rich do not 'facilitate' anything. They are not running around getting buyers and sellers in touch. That is an _entirely_ different concept called a middle-man. The position of a middle man in society is debatable, but that's not what we're talking about.
The rich merely _own_ everything, and charge us rent to use it, and take a cut of everything we do, and do _nothing at all_. (They 'invest', which is a fancy way to say 'They will sometime be willing to grace us with some of their money, if they think they will get more back.)
The Breivik thing is mostly a myth. Apparently, in Norway, you can be kept in jail even after your sentence is up. So he's not getting out even after the 21 years are over.
The major thing that gets me is, if we're going to require photo IDs for things other than driving, why the fuck they're still under the DMV. The thing about DMV is that they are distributed in completely crazy ways, entirely dependent on the driving population, and, what's more, usually assume you can drive to them. (Yes, that's a bit of a weird paradox...until you remember that 60% of the people going to DMV are there to renew a license, so already have one, and another 25% are there to get a license...which requires a car they can take the driver's test in, so someone else drove them there. Basically, the only people who can, and need to, walk to the DMV are those with suspended or expired licenses.)
If we're going to require IDs, we need to just require them. Every damn courthouse in the state should have photo ID areas. Issue them to everyone. When you go to the DMV, they can put a damn checkmark next to your name in the database, there's no reason to even have a different 'driver's license'.
I was going to mention places like car rental companies that need to know you are licensed, but I actually think those already have links to DMV computers. If not, they should have, and if that's too much work, the DMV can issue you a driver's license without a photo on it, akin to how hunting licenses work. It's just a piece of paper, and needs no security features at all.
There's no reason that 'licenses' and 'IDs' should be the same thing, and a lot of reasons they shouldn't. (The courts seems to enjoy physically taking away driver's licenses. The courts should not have the right to render you unidentified, or to make you go get another ID, especially as you now can't drive. Being able to prove who you are is such a fundamental right it doesn't exist, because no one's ever bothered to think of it.) Having them the same was a completely random accident.
And we should also put up ID booths at voting places. You go and vote, and then, if you have some free time and it's not busy, you get an ID. And there's a long enough run-up time that, over the next decade, so by the end of it, everyone who passed though got an ID.
That's how you do voter ID in a sane manner, pretending you're actually worried about the entirely fictional problem of people showing up in person to vote fraudulently. (And also pretending that the volunteers running the voting can somehow spot fake ID. If you've faked an identity enough to vote, you certainly have a fake ID.) You put ID stations in courthouses and polling places, tell people they're going to need those IDs in a decade to vote, and then check back in a decade and see if most people have them.
What the Republicans are worried about, however, is something else entirely. Start with 'the wrong sort of' and ends with 'people voting'.
Yeah! 18 minute is certainly long enough time to serve for committing a instance of felony unauthorized computer access, along with entering into a conspiracy for others to do that. 18 minutes is entirely reasonable for a felony+conspiracy to help others commit a felony.
Now, I have a few questions: What day is he getting out, does someone have a gun I can borrow, and is it 18 minutes for all felonies, or does it scale up to a few hours for each murder? Murder being a random example, that is. I'm, uh, writing a book.
Unauthorized access of a computer is a felony. (Doing that for the purpose of selling someone else access like that is probably an additional felony, it looks roughly like conspiracy to me. But let's ignore that.) That is, every single authorized access is a felony.
This guy got 30 months for committing 72000 felonies?
I know jail time doesn't necessarily 'stack', and that unauthorized computer access is one of the lower-class of felonies, and probably supposed to only be a year in jail at most.
But, still, this is completely absurd. That sentence is 18 minutes per felony.
Malware and computer hijacking, is basically the legal equivalent of carpeting a football stadium of people with tear gas. If you did that, you'd be charged with tens of thousands of instances of basic assault (A crime which is roughly in the same ballpark, legally, as unauthorized computer access.) and end up in jail almost forever.
But somehow unauthorized computer access, despite being something that each individual instance is supposed to result in (at least) months in jail, and which does result in months in jail when it's against the wrong person, aka, a big corporation...somehow all that just goes away if you do it against enough people at once via malware.
If I invented a robot that went around stealing from 72000 stores, they wouldn't just laugh and give me the equivalent of five counts of shoplifting in jail time. If I kill twenty people at once, they don't just laugh and say 'Oh, that was really just one instance, let's sentence him for, oh, two murders, that seems fair.'
72000 felonies.
And let's not forget, these have actual victims. Here's a fun question: Would you rather be punched in the face once (Basic assault), or have to reinstall your entire computer? (And, as only 25% of the population has any sort of backup at all, let's pretend you'd lose 75% of your stuff.)
Yeah, I thought so. There's a reason we actually made the law the way we made it, where those two are within the same order of magnitude as crimes. The courts, OTOH, seem to think that some guy hacking a computer server of a powerful company (Which is one computer and hence one felony.) is much much worse than someone hijacking 72000 human-owned computers.
I did not say Romney was absurd. (Absurd would, quite possibly, be the last word I'd use to describe him.)
I said his 'policy' is not actually a policy of any sort. He doesn't even have any proposed budget. (Despite him trying to claim the 'balanced budget' part of the Ryan budget while disclaiming the horrifying aspects of it.)
What he has presented is, instead, nonsense. Although, admitted, I was mostly thinking of his budget policy, which does not actually exist.
But the rest of his policies also appear to be nonsense, from what I've studied. His Russian policy, for example, is just completely insane.
Although it's hard to wade through his policies, as about half of 'his policy' are made-up criticisms of Obama, only about a third have any bearing in fact at all. (Not that I am saying they are correct, I am saying only about a third of the facts are true and not misleading to start with.)
Of course, I have no idea why I'm explaining this to you, you're a retarded monkey who think Obama and Romney have the same policies. (And probably can't actually talk about a single policy of either of them.)
I don't have any problem with requiring an ID, but if you're going to create a new requirement, you better have the infrastructure in place and do it in an orderly enough fashion that it doesn't disenfranchise millions of voters.
Indeed. How come no one's every passed a voter ID law that say 'In ten years, we will require IDs at the polls. Ramping up to that, we will have education at the polls, and a place where people can get ID easily (Perhaps until then, we could provide that at the polls, after people vote.) and some sort of milestone we have to hit with X% of the population with IDs.'?
No, it's always some sort of instant law, shoved through as fast as possible, with crazy restrictions on the ID required...for a crime that does not actually happen. Shoved through by people who are completely ignorant that a lot of people have no ID, and completely ignorant that the crime they are fighting literally happens once, in the entire US, a year. And are not very good at hiding the fact they have no problem with certain people being unable to vote.
And other forms of voting fraud are completely ignored. No one ever goes after absentee fraud, despite that literally being hundred times as abused. (Literally in bold because, yes, I actually mean literally.)
I would have no problem with some sort of voter ID law if, and only if, we're going to have mandatory ID in this country...everyone has a government provided ID, and it's free and all paperwork required to get it is free, and it has to stay up to day, and that's it.
Otherwise voter ID laws are discriminatory by definition against people without driver's licenses. (Which is not really an issue, except 'people without driver's licenses' actually means, in general, 'poor people who live in cities' and 'very old people'.) If the government want us to fucking carry a piece of plastic around to exercise the franchise, the government will goddamn give us that piece of plastic, for free, with as little work on our part as possible.
So your theory is that we need voter IDs laws to stop people from voting fraudulently using absentee ballots, which require no photo ID?
Oddly enough, no Republicans ever want to do anything about absentee ballot fraud. Of course, it's not actually statistically important anyway, we have good enough laws about it, but it's abused a fuckload more than in-person voting.
The simple fact is that no one shows at the polls to vote under the wrong name. Period. Ever. I think some study found that there were 10 cases in the last decade, which means the same amount of votes cast under the wrong name as this guy, personally, did himself.
Or, to put it another: Statistically an election's outcome is three times more likely to be altered by someone being struck by lighting the day of the election than by someone fraudulently voting in person.
Yes, astonishingly, if you stop right before the Republican party decided to pander to racists with the Southern Strategy, and invent some complete nonsense about Nixon and MLK in prison, why, it's completely inexplicable why black voters would have issues with Republicans! (1)
So, let's stop immediately after the 1968 passage of the CRA, and be sure not to reach the racist dog-whistle claptrap that was the 1968 and 1972 presidential election. (Of course, at that time, many people outside the South couldn't hear the dog-whistles, so Nixon still got about 30% of the black vote.)
Now are all Republicans need are time-displaced black voters who arrived here from mid-1968 and completely missed everything that happened since then. Or maybe even from the mid-70s! Sometime before the trick of stirring up racists in the South became obvious, somewhere around 1980 or so, when 'welfare queens' started showing up and the rest of the country realized what was going on.
Actually, first the Republicans probably want to stop lying about welfare again and all the dog-whistling involved therein. Then fire up the time machine.
1) BTW, the much vaulted 'higher percentage' is only like 15%. Something like 65%-70% of Democrats supported CRAs, and 80-85% Republicans, depending on which bill and house you're talking about. And it was introduced by Democrats and a Democratic president.
Basically, any 'model' that predicts anything except an Obama win needs to explain why everything currently looks like an Obama win, and why that is going to change. You can't stand there and predict the winner of a horserace halfway-over will be the horse lagging behind 40 feet unless you have some sort of reason why that will change. And such reasons _could_ exist. Perhaps in a bad economy, undecideds go, at the last minute, for the non-incumbent. However, no 'model' has actually included such logic, probably because historically that is not true.(I do not know either way.)
Anyway, it really looks like this election is going to be a retread of the last one, where anyone who actually paid attention knew Obama was going to win at least a month in advance, but somehow that still 'surprised' the media. (Not really, but their paycheck depends on them making it into a close race.)
We're still far enough out right now that it is possible in theory that something major could happen and cause Obama to lose, although, looking at this election so far, it appear much more likely that Romney will fuck up in some major way and lose even worse. I predict it will be the debate, where Obama will tear apart whatever fiscal plan Romney finally puts forward.
Barring some complete fuckup on Obama's part, however, he's got this election. The electoral votes simply are not there for Romney.
I think the general conclusion is when the right says 'Small business owner', they actually mean 'businesses owned by a small amount of owners'. Places like Bain Capital, Koch Industries, etc. To tell with those companies owned by poor people.
The ability for small businesses to actually provide health insurance is something that anyone who actually cared about small businesses would love.
The ability for individuals to actually afford health insurance outside of their job is something that anyone who actually cared about 'entrepreneurs' would love.
Of course, as we all know, Republicans used to like them, until the Democrats did.
Now, think of how he let people know about those qualities. He didn't.
Yes he did. He very clearly told the voters that he did not have bat-shit insane polices.
That was the problem.
Yes, because he failed to notice the voters he was talking to were the Republican base, so pointing out the lack of bat-shit insane policies was, in fact, not a good idea.
The Republicans have tried to cloud the issue by removing Medicare, creating an entirely new program and _naming it Medicare_, so I really hope that the name 'Vouchercare' takes off and we can start using that.
The idea that insurance companies are willing to sell insurance to the elderly at all to hilariously laughable. They won't even sell insurance to me, and I assure you, I'm a fuckload less expensive medically than anyone over 60 that I know.
I like the fact that Romney has a 'plan', but Obama only has 'vague numbers'.
In other words, Romney has a goddamn letter to Santa, many point which are completely based on utter nonsense, like the 'Hey, It's Obama's fault that a company that got a loan under Bush's green energy program failed, because that loan was made two weeks into Obama's term'. And 'The problem is all those goddamn teacher unions'. And 'We're going to balance the budget via cutting more programs than actually exist, although we'll carefully not name them because no one would vote for us if we did'.
Whereas Obama has an _actual budget_.
Where's Romney's? And, no, dancing around the Ryan budget doesn't count...if he wants to use that, he can, but he can't stand there pretending he somehow has the magically balanced budget of the Ryan budget, while ignoring the fact it _decimates_ government services.
Mommy, Mommy, the Democrats are using math instead of making random impossible promises about the budget and vague criticisms of the President based on imaginary premises! Make them stop!
I can't wait for the debate, because we appear to be headed for a total meltdown of the Romney campaign, when it is either unable to provide any sort of policy specifications at all, _or_ it provides something like the Ryan plan and people realize 'Holy shit, that thing is for real.'. Either one of those will be _awesome_. (There have been polls that have demonstrated that Americans, when explained the Ryan budget plan, tend to think it's imaginary, because no one would actually propose that stuff.)
If you do, you're not thinking hard enough about your own life and what it would be like without the profit motive of people around you.
Yes, I often wish that people have some sort of profit motive to deny me good and services.
Wait, no I don't.
You realize that the insurance industry has a backwards profit motive of other corporations, right? The _less_ health care I get, the _more_ money they keep.
I can imagine how this would work in a grocery store. Instead of shopping, I give a $200 a week to a third party, a 'food insurer', and in return he promises to feed me enough for a week. (In this universe, sometimes people get supernaturally hungry and start eating $200,000 a year, so this insurance makes sense.)
What sort of food do you think people would end up eating?
I love people who have become so attached to the free market they do not actually understand where different corporations profits comes from, which is a rather important part of actually having a free market. (As most of the problems that need regulation come from where companies start making money on the _wrong things_.)
Insurance companies make money by reducing claims. This is all well and good when they're an art insurance company and they reduce claims by security audits and theft recovery people. It's not good when they're a health insurance company and they reduce claims by...not providing health care and dropping sick people.
There is an actual contract, actual consideration changing hands, and actual case law to help settle differences.
Are you serious?
Have you actually ever used health insurance for anything outside of routine stuff?
You realize we just had to pass a law saying they couldn't drop people from insurance because they got sick, and couldn't make up bogus pre-existing conditions. You realize that, right? You're not just some alien who showed up yesterday on this planet and thinks that health insurance companies actually provide any sort of useful services to people who are seriously ill?
Want to fix things? It sure as hell doesn't start with cutting Defense spending or Social Security. It begins with culling things like those bailouts and things like Solyndra.
You can't actually claim to be serious and then whine about Solyndra. Solyndra is a nonsensical issue brought up mainly in the attempt to make some sort of Obama scandal out of it, although that fell apart when it was pointed out that 99% of that happened under Bush and someone in the DOE authorizing the loan a few days after Obama got in office does not mean Obama had anything to do with it. That's the only reason anyone knows anything about it, the attempt to make it a scandal. That was a $26 billion dollar program to give out loans to energy companies, and a possible loss of $529 million dollars is not particularly important.
And while you can complain about the entire loan program, the fact is, the rest of them are on track to make their loan payments, and hence the program made money even with the Solyndra loss, so that's not a good example either.
And excluding defense spending is crazy. There is absolutely no reason we need to spend anywhere near as much as we spend on defense. We have no actual threats that could be deterred via most defense spending, and no reason to have military bases in 90% of the places we do.
It begins with curtailing what gets spent on Medicaid (Those here illegally get better medical care than the REST of us, including those on Medicare... Meds, glasses, etc. All paid for off of each and everyone's backs...)- and cutting off those that are not really legally entitled to it.
While we _are_ paying for the medical care of those here illegally (Because they go to hospitals and then do not pay, which means we do), I have no idea why you think they get meds and glasses for free.
While that won't fix things, the first item addresses one of the major causes of the "problem". The second forces a re-assessment of things. Might raise your insurance rates, might not. Obamacare will.
Obamacare's _already_ lowered insurance rates, because of the requirement that 80% of premiums go towards care.
The third's based on the premise that the "insurance" scheme we're doing here in the country's more of a scam inflicted on the patients and the doctors. You don't typically get "insurance" on piddly things for your car, right? Why should you do the same thing with health or other insurance?
Erm, while insurance _is_ a scam, it is not a scam for the reason you think it is.
Your health is not 'piddly', and _anyone_ can be hit, _at any time_, by health care costs they can never, in their entire life, pay off.
Treating it as 'insurance' is indeed stupid. But saying 'People could just pay for it themselves' is not very reasonable either, as people clearly _can't_.
This is why health insurance is a scam. Because things that everyone needs, and everyone (except the super-rich) have the possibility of not being able to pay for, is not something that should be left to the private sector at all. It should be right up there with 'police protection', as it's something that individuals who use it cannot actually afford., but something that, society-wide, is something we want.
Insurance is a reasonable idea when it's some sort of custom thing per person. It is entirely reasonable for a museum to insure against loses, and the insurance company comes out and says 'You have to do X, Y, and Z and we'll insure you for this much.'.
It is not any sort of reasonable model when there's an entire segment of society that needs it, and it's even less of a reasonable model everyone needs it, and it's even less of one when failure to have it means everyone else has to pay.If everyone needs it, and the lack of it hurts everyone, then the solution is to just tax people more and _provide_ it, not via any 'insurance' model.
I am suddenly reminded of the 'fire insurance' that some places have started offering, and how
SS used to take more in then it spent. That money was taken by the general fund and spent. It now spends more then it takes in. Have you heard of the baby boom?
That wasn't because of the baby boom, you idiot. That's because we have a recession going on here and unemployed people don't pay payroll taxes, and people retired early. So, until the economy turns around, payouts will exceed revenue for about 5% each year. (And it's not helped by payroll tax holidays.)
Extrapolating revenues and payouts based on our current financial situation is idiotic.
The _actual_ baby-boomer problems hits in 2017, and over the next 20 years, will eventually run out the trust fund.
The trust fund is a lie. Nobody would allow a company to maintain a trust full of its own bonds. It's an even worse idea to let the government do it. All that money will ether come out of the general fund or it will be printed.
Companies maintain separate areas of money all the time, you idiot, and move money around between them all the time. One part of the company doesn't need some of its yearly budget yet, but another part needs it earlier.
And what the fuck does 'out of the general fund' mean? Yes, it's coming 'out of the general fund'. The goddamn general fund borrowed from social security, and social security is taking back the amount it loaned them. ('I can't can't pay back your loan, that money would come straight of out my bank account!' 'Uh, yeah, that's generally where money comes from.')
'The trust fund is a lie' is complete and utter nonsense, spewed by total buffoons who have no idea what words actually mean. The Federal government has two goddamn bank accounts, and has for years been moving stuff from the SS account to the general one, to keep from paying interest on loans to the general ones, and now, when SS runs low, is moving it back. Yes, _of course_ this is going to be a problem, because the government can't balance its budget and SS had been making things better for it, and will no longer do so.
While, indeed, you can choose to steal all the money that people have put in social security by changing the laws, you cannot also complain there is a problem with social security, which is 'People want to steal from it'.
You are people who are running around threatening to rob banks because, in your own words 'It's not safe to put money in banks, because people will steal it'. And hence you have to get all the money _out_ of the banks by stealing it. Problem solved!
You do realize that, under the ACA, that states can essentially opt-out if they have a system that will provide the same level of care? It's called an innovation waiver. Vermont already planning on opting out into their own single-payer, and is trying it done _now_ instead of waiting until the entire ACA kicks in.
The problem with saying 'Let the states do it' is...the states have had a goddamn two decades to do it at this point, pretending the problems with health care first became an issue in 1992. (Of course, that was an issue before that, but let's pretend.)
Some of the states did...and most of them didn't.
If a state wants to come up with their own plan, or even _has_ their own plan currently, and this plan _actually works_ in providing affordable health care to, I dunno, 95% of the residents, and the Federal government makes them do something else, feel free to complain at that point.
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Except we did do something about this problem. It was called the PPACA, aka, Obamacare, and made significant improvements to the long-term viability of Medicaid. (For one thing, the medical industry agreed to large cuts in Medicaid and Medicare payments, in return for the government stopping the _massive_ hemorrhaging of cash that unpaid bills were sucking out. The PPACA will greatly reduce those unpaid bills, and there's a bunch of other stuff.)
Talking about Medicaid/Medicare's budget outlook from _2000_ is idiotic, and probably an attempt to be deliberately misleading on your part. Medical spending has, indeed, gone up, but nowhere near enough to explain the current deficit. (In fact, Medicare spending somehow decided to start going down itself starting in 2010, before all this.)
There is exactly three things that have altered, in the negative direction, the budget since we last had it mostly balanced in the late 90s: The wars, the Bush tax cut, and the economic downturn. (And for a while, TARP, but that's almost all paid back now, with interest.)
That's it. That's all the major stuff that changed. Medical expenses going up by whatever amount, and Medicare and Medicaid going up, were tiny changes in comparison. (And part of Medicare going up was the massive giveaway of Medicare D under Bush.)
Now, talking about what 'causes' the deficit is nearly meaningless. Obviously, we could cut any spending that totaled the deficit and balance the budget. But the part that changed since we had it balanced of government policy was the _massive_ tax cuts that reduced revenue and two expensive wars. (And then the economy crashed, but I will be charitable and not include that as a government policy.)
Those two things together add up to about two-thirds the current deficit and the economy is the last third. The amount that Medicaid and Medicare take from the general budget (As opposed to being funded by Medicare premiums.) doesn't come near that, much less the _change_ in them since we had the budget balanced.
But we are talking about a bipartisan plan that was passed and signed by the president because it was the best deal everyone would agree to and would solve the problem.
No, we're talking about a bipartisan plan that was passed and signed by the president because otherwise the Republicans were threatening to run us into the debt ceiling. Again
What I've always found astonishing is that we spend so much money making everything we have in the military portable.
What happened to defending the country? Why don't we have guns and torpedo launchers at important harbors? Why don't we have AA guns along the coast?
Set those two things up, and give them to Canada for their southern east and west coasts, stick some along our southern border, and, presto, invasion has become almost impossible.
An invasion force landing in Mexico to try to invade America would be smashed flat by America, _in Mexico_, as soon as Mexico said 'Uh, guys, we've been invaded and we think you're next. Help please?'. That war might be pretty shitty for Mexico, but we could keep them from reaching the US. Same if someone invades Canada from the top, although there it would be funnier to just cut their supply lines and let them freeze to death.
The US is in an _impossible_ good position against _any_ potential invasion except from Canada. East and west are water, and south is either water or the extreme inhospitable (and cover-less and people-less) terrain of the American southwest. And a Canadian invasion would be suicidal for Canada, so we just need to make sure no one else uses them as a path.
Defend our east and west, give guns to Canada to defend their east and west, and we've basically secured the country, militarily. We're a fuckload safer from invasion than, say, Belgium or Ecuador or any random county with half a dozen neighbors and possible invasion points. It's worth mentioning that _every_ war we've lost any continental American territory during has been with our neighbors. (Or, rather, the European countries that owned our neighbors at the time.)
But no, about the only protected-by-defenses-fortifications in the entire country is Washington. That's it. That (and military bases obviously) are the sole point in this country ready to fend off attacks. Hell, we're letting our highways system (Which is how we move the military around this country) go to crap. We've even crippled the National Guard by shipping them, and their equipment, overseas.
We have our shit spread out all around the world. If we can't put it on the back of a truck and haul it around, or fly it off an aircraft carrier, we don't want it. Everything our military owes is designed to operate in some random environment somewhere else, instead of actually building fortifications here in this country. (Which would be a hell of a lot cheaper.)
No only is our military given vastly more money than it needs, it does not even appear to be completing the _actual_ purpose of a military. I don't actually think an invasion of the country is likely at all, but as the _premise_ of a military is to defend against that (It's why we have the Department of 'Defense', after all), perhaps we should do that _first_.
Christ, this conversation is so funny I don't want to stop it (Hint: At least half the people here are trolls, and trying to make libertarians look like idiots) but I thought I should mention that you cannot write people in on the presidential ballot who have not going to each state and picked electors in that state.
I.e., for a Ron Paul write-in to count, Ron Paul must have sent someone to your state to register X people as electors for him and pay whatever small fee is required for that.(1) This is because you do not actually vote for president, you vote for presidential electors. For a write-in to work, they have to know what _electors_ that write-in has.
Anyone written-in on the presidential ballot that does not have registered electors cannot win, period. Ron Paul cannot win your state, if he has not registered as a write-in in your state, even if he gets 100% of the vote via write-in. (2)
1) Actually, all write-in candidates have to register, so that the election people know _which_ of the millions of people with that name just got elected via write-in. But it _doubly_ requires that for the presidential election...even if the state magically knew which 'Ron Paul' just won the vote, it then has to certify five (or whatever amount your state has) specific real individual people to go cast a vote (presumably for him) at the electoral college.
2) This is not actually true at 100%. If literally 100% of the people voted for Ron Paul, that would result in an election without a winner, aka, a tie, and turn the election over to the state legislature, which could then select whatever electors they wanted...and they presumably would select pro-Ron Paul electors, at least if they wanted to get reelected in their impossibly pro-Ron Paul state. But if _all but one person_ voted for Ron Paul, that other person's choice would win. (And in reality, you would think the other candidates electors would at least vote for themselves on the ballot!)
The space program should be left to those countries that have their environmental, energy, population and human rights problems solved.
You're entirely right, yet exactly wrong.
The space program is not going to solve problems on earth, except by accident.
Although these accidents have happened. As has been pointed out, the space program has been a _huge_ help to environmentalism, and pretty much the only reason we know 95% of the stuff we know. Data about the atmosphere doesn't just magically appear.
And NASA research, I should point out, is also a huge boast to energy...a significant portion of miniaturization, low-power consumption, and battery development comes from NASA research. You can argue private industry has taken a hold of those now, but NASA is the place all that started. The mere existence of NASA research has probably cut our national energy consumption by 0.1%. (Which doesn't sound like much, but more than pays for NASA.)
But the pie-in-the-sky stuff is nonsense. We can't solve the problems of the planet with space travel. So you're right.
But you are completely wrong in that we need to solve other problems. Why? Because the space program doesn't cost anything. Not compared to the problems we need to solve. NASA is completely trivial in the amount of money we spend on it compared to actual problems.
Complaining about how much it costs is about as relevant as someone in a household complaining about how much electricity spent watching TV costs...doesn't everyone know that the car needs a new transmission? Yes, if no one watches TV for, oh, 2000 years, we can buy a new transmission. Or, you know, we could cut the hundreds of dollars a month we spend on buying and training sharks with lasers mounted on their head to defend against imaginary enemies. (Meanwhile, the household watching TV has also taught us many useful things, which hasn't saved a lot of money, but at least make up for the electricity!)
You want to cut the manned mission to Mars? Be aware in four decades you'll be standing in the same place, and this post will also include at the start something like 'And food preservation, NASA's research for manned missions reduces the amount that food spoils before consumption, saving 1% of all food made. (Which doesn't sound like much, but more than pays for NASA.)' or something like that.
tl;dr - NASA is probably a net _gain_ to society, a net gain _to the actual problems you were talking about_, and even if it's not, its cost is so _microscopic_ compared to the money swirling around those problems already that there is no reason to target it even if it accomplishes nothing at all.
I, personally, would argue that considering the gains we've gotten out of NASA, it might even make sense to come up with some new government agencies with other crazy restrictions and demand they figure out ways to do things. 'Without using any steel or iron alloy at all, whatsoever, construct a skyscraper.'
Wow, you're an imbecilic:
You: Obama didn't submit a budget.
coinreturn: Yes he did.
You: *Gives links to articles pointing out that Obama submitted a budget*
You also are apparently unaware that budgets _are not spending bills_. (And hence can be passed in either house first.) Budgets are simply saying _how_ money _will be_ allocated via spending bills, not actually allocate it. The complaint of a budget being a 'loose model' means you have absolutely no idea of how the entire process works. That is how budgets work. It is _spending bills_ that get into specifics, and the _House_ makes those, not the president. (And they are more than one bill, usually. There's a highway spending bill, a defense spending bill, etc, etc, plus an omnibus one that contains a lot of smaller ones.)
The only part of your story that is correct is that, yes, the 2010 Democrat-controlled House did not pass a spending bill for 2011, punting instead to the next congress. That is, indeed, something to be critical of.
The reason no spending bills or budgets have passed _since_ then is that the GOP House keeps coming up with absurd spending budgets and spending bills. They did it for the 2011 spending bill punted to them, and they did it for 2012, and they're currently doing it for 2013. Their spending bills were often so absurd that no Democrats vote for them. (And they are hilariously unable to punt with a continuing resolution this time, thanks to the Sequester that _they_ required of themselves.)
And all this is irrelevant to the fact they won't pass a debt ceiling increase. Regardless of how the money was allocated and spent (And legally there's no different between a new spending bill and the emergency 'We will continue all spending at the levels under the last bill'.), it _was_ allocated and spent, and thus the debt ceiling needed raising. The Republicans once let the government come so close to default that our bond rating was downgraded, and only fixed it after the Bush tax cuts were extended, and then the Republicans did it _again_ (And note the last time they did it they promised that, if the Bush tax cuts were extended, they wouldn't do it again.) by demanding spending cuts...but this time the Democrats managed to get the sequester instead so that the _Republicans_ have to make cuts in their sacred cows also, and the Republicans, predictable, blew up their spending committee and didn't actually manage to come up with any recommendations. (Paul Ryan, hilariously, runs around complaining about all this, hoping no one realizes he's the reason the committee failed. Paul Ryan likes to pretend the committee actually succeeded and made recommendations...it did not.)
Basically, at this point, we're all just hoping that the Republicans lose the House, and someone can actually make _sane_ financial decisions of actually making budgets and spending bills that can get through Congress and doing housekeeping like the debt ceiling without blowing up the country.
Don't fall for their shit . Most of the rich do not 'facilitate' anything. They are not running around getting buyers and sellers in touch. That is an _entirely_ different concept called a middle-man. The position of a middle man in society is debatable, but that's not what we're talking about.
The rich merely _own_ everything, and charge us rent to use it, and take a cut of everything we do, and do _nothing at all_. (They 'invest', which is a fancy way to say 'They will sometime be willing to grace us with some of their money, if they think they will get more back.)
The Breivik thing is mostly a myth. Apparently, in Norway, you can be kept in jail even after your sentence is up. So he's not getting out even after the 21 years are over.
This makes no sense to me, though.
The major thing that gets me is, if we're going to require photo IDs for things other than driving, why the fuck they're still under the DMV. The thing about DMV is that they are distributed in completely crazy ways, entirely dependent on the driving population, and, what's more, usually assume you can drive to them. (Yes, that's a bit of a weird paradox...until you remember that 60% of the people going to DMV are there to renew a license, so already have one, and another 25% are there to get a license...which requires a car they can take the driver's test in, so someone else drove them there. Basically, the only people who can, and need to, walk to the DMV are those with suspended or expired licenses.)
If we're going to require IDs, we need to just require them. Every damn courthouse in the state should have photo ID areas. Issue them to everyone. When you go to the DMV, they can put a damn checkmark next to your name in the database, there's no reason to even have a different 'driver's license'.
I was going to mention places like car rental companies that need to know you are licensed, but I actually think those already have links to DMV computers. If not, they should have, and if that's too much work, the DMV can issue you a driver's license without a photo on it, akin to how hunting licenses work. It's just a piece of paper, and needs no security features at all.
There's no reason that 'licenses' and 'IDs' should be the same thing, and a lot of reasons they shouldn't. (The courts seems to enjoy physically taking away driver's licenses. The courts should not have the right to render you unidentified, or to make you go get another ID, especially as you now can't drive. Being able to prove who you are is such a fundamental right it doesn't exist, because no one's ever bothered to think of it.) Having them the same was a completely random accident.
And we should also put up ID booths at voting places. You go and vote, and then, if you have some free time and it's not busy, you get an ID. And there's a long enough run-up time that, over the next decade, so by the end of it, everyone who passed though got an ID.
That's how you do voter ID in a sane manner, pretending you're actually worried about the entirely fictional problem of people showing up in person to vote fraudulently. (And also pretending that the volunteers running the voting can somehow spot fake ID. If you've faked an identity enough to vote, you certainly have a fake ID.) You put ID stations in courthouses and polling places, tell people they're going to need those IDs in a decade to vote, and then check back in a decade and see if most people have them.
What the Republicans are worried about, however, is something else entirely. Start with 'the wrong sort of' and ends with 'people voting'.
Yeah! 18 minute is certainly long enough time to serve for committing a instance of felony unauthorized computer access, along with entering into a conspiracy for others to do that. 18 minutes is entirely reasonable for a felony+conspiracy to help others commit a felony.
Now, I have a few questions: What day is he getting out, does someone have a gun I can borrow, and is it 18 minutes for all felonies, or does it scale up to a few hours for each murder? Murder being a random example, that is. I'm, uh, writing a book.
Unauthorized access of a computer is a felony. (Doing that for the purpose of selling someone else access like that is probably an additional felony, it looks roughly like conspiracy to me. But let's ignore that.) That is, every single authorized access is a felony.
This guy got 30 months for committing 72000 felonies?
I know jail time doesn't necessarily 'stack', and that unauthorized computer access is one of the lower-class of felonies, and probably supposed to only be a year in jail at most.
But, still, this is completely absurd. That sentence is 18 minutes per felony.
Malware and computer hijacking, is basically the legal equivalent of carpeting a football stadium of people with tear gas. If you did that, you'd be charged with tens of thousands of instances of basic assault (A crime which is roughly in the same ballpark, legally, as unauthorized computer access.) and end up in jail almost forever.
But somehow unauthorized computer access, despite being something that each individual instance is supposed to result in (at least) months in jail, and which does result in months in jail when it's against the wrong person, aka, a big corporation...somehow all that just goes away if you do it against enough people at once via malware.
If I invented a robot that went around stealing from 72000 stores, they wouldn't just laugh and give me the equivalent of five counts of shoplifting in jail time. If I kill twenty people at once, they don't just laugh and say 'Oh, that was really just one instance, let's sentence him for, oh, two murders, that seems fair.'
72000 felonies.
And let's not forget, these have actual victims. Here's a fun question: Would you rather be punched in the face once (Basic assault), or have to reinstall your entire computer? (And, as only 25% of the population has any sort of backup at all, let's pretend you'd lose 75% of your stuff.)
Yeah, I thought so. There's a reason we actually made the law the way we made it, where those two are within the same order of magnitude as crimes. The courts, OTOH, seem to think that some guy hacking a computer server of a powerful company (Which is one computer and hence one felony.) is much much worse than someone hijacking 72000 human-owned computers.
I did not say Romney was absurd. (Absurd would, quite possibly, be the last word I'd use to describe him.)
I said his 'policy' is not actually a policy of any sort. He doesn't even have any proposed budget. (Despite him trying to claim the 'balanced budget' part of the Ryan budget while disclaiming the horrifying aspects of it.)
What he has presented is, instead, nonsense. Although, admitted, I was mostly thinking of his budget policy, which does not actually exist.
But the rest of his policies also appear to be nonsense, from what I've studied. His Russian policy, for example, is just completely insane.
Although it's hard to wade through his policies, as about half of 'his policy' are made-up criticisms of Obama, only about a third have any bearing in fact at all. (Not that I am saying they are correct, I am saying only about a third of the facts are true and not misleading to start with.)
Of course, I have no idea why I'm explaining this to you, you're a retarded monkey who think Obama and Romney have the same policies. (And probably can't actually talk about a single policy of either of them.)
I don't have any problem with requiring an ID, but if you're going to create a new requirement, you better have the infrastructure in place and do it in an orderly enough fashion that it doesn't disenfranchise millions of voters.
Indeed. How come no one's every passed a voter ID law that say 'In ten years, we will require IDs at the polls. Ramping up to that, we will have education at the polls, and a place where people can get ID easily (Perhaps until then, we could provide that at the polls, after people vote.) and some sort of milestone we have to hit with X% of the population with IDs.'?
No, it's always some sort of instant law, shoved through as fast as possible, with crazy restrictions on the ID required...for a crime that does not actually happen. Shoved through by people who are completely ignorant that a lot of people have no ID, and completely ignorant that the crime they are fighting literally happens once, in the entire US, a year. And are not very good at hiding the fact they have no problem with certain people being unable to vote.
And other forms of voting fraud are completely ignored. No one ever goes after absentee fraud, despite that literally being hundred times as abused. (Literally in bold because, yes, I actually mean literally.)
I would have no problem with some sort of voter ID law if, and only if, we're going to have mandatory ID in this country...everyone has a government provided ID, and it's free and all paperwork required to get it is free, and it has to stay up to day, and that's it.
Otherwise voter ID laws are discriminatory by definition against people without driver's licenses. (Which is not really an issue, except 'people without driver's licenses' actually means, in general, 'poor people who live in cities' and 'very old people'.) If the government want us to fucking carry a piece of plastic around to exercise the franchise, the government will goddamn give us that piece of plastic, for free, with as little work on our part as possible.
So your theory is that we need voter IDs laws to stop people from voting fraudulently using absentee ballots, which require no photo ID?
Oddly enough, no Republicans ever want to do anything about absentee ballot fraud. Of course, it's not actually statistically important anyway, we have good enough laws about it, but it's abused a fuckload more than in-person voting.
The simple fact is that no one shows at the polls to vote under the wrong name. Period. Ever. I think some study found that there were 10 cases in the last decade, which means the same amount of votes cast under the wrong name as this guy, personally, did himself.
Or, to put it another: Statistically an election's outcome is three times more likely to be altered by someone being struck by lighting the day of the election than by someone fraudulently voting in person.
Yes, astonishingly, if you stop right before the Republican party decided to pander to racists with the Southern Strategy, and invent some complete nonsense about Nixon and MLK in prison, why, it's completely inexplicable why black voters would have issues with Republicans! (1)
So, let's stop immediately after the 1968 passage of the CRA, and be sure not to reach the racist dog-whistle claptrap that was the 1968 and 1972 presidential election. (Of course, at that time, many people outside the South couldn't hear the dog-whistles, so Nixon still got about 30% of the black vote.)
Now are all Republicans need are time-displaced black voters who arrived here from mid-1968 and completely missed everything that happened since then. Or maybe even from the mid-70s! Sometime before the trick of stirring up racists in the South became obvious, somewhere around 1980 or so, when 'welfare queens' started showing up and the rest of the country realized what was going on.
Actually, first the Republicans probably want to stop lying about welfare again and all the dog-whistling involved therein. Then fire up the time machine.
1) BTW, the much vaulted 'higher percentage' is only like 15%. Something like 65%-70% of Democrats supported CRAs, and 80-85% Republicans, depending on which bill and house you're talking about. And it was introduced by Democrats and a Democratic president.
Basically, any 'model' that predicts anything except an Obama win needs to explain why everything currently looks like an Obama win, and why that is going to change. You can't stand there and predict the winner of a horserace halfway-over will be the horse lagging behind 40 feet unless you have some sort of reason why that will change. And such reasons _could_ exist. Perhaps in a bad economy, undecideds go, at the last minute, for the non-incumbent. However, no 'model' has actually included such logic, probably because historically that is not true.(I do not know either way.)
Anyway, it really looks like this election is going to be a retread of the last one, where anyone who actually paid attention knew Obama was going to win at least a month in advance, but somehow that still 'surprised' the media. (Not really, but their paycheck depends on them making it into a close race.)
We're still far enough out right now that it is possible in theory that something major could happen and cause Obama to lose, although, looking at this election so far, it appear much more likely that Romney will fuck up in some major way and lose even worse. I predict it will be the debate, where Obama will tear apart whatever fiscal plan Romney finally puts forward.
Barring some complete fuckup on Obama's part, however, he's got this election. The electoral votes simply are not there for Romney.
Romney doesn't even have policies. He's got an absurd wish-list of things that should somehow happen.
I think the general conclusion is when the right says 'Small business owner', they actually mean 'businesses owned by a small amount of owners'. Places like Bain Capital, Koch Industries, etc. To tell with those companies owned by poor people.
The ability for small businesses to actually provide health insurance is something that anyone who actually cared about small businesses would love.
The ability for individuals to actually afford health insurance outside of their job is something that anyone who actually cared about 'entrepreneurs' would love.
Of course, as we all know, Republicans used to like them, until the Democrats did.
What good qualities did the guy have?
He did not have bat-shit insane policies?
Now, think of how he let people know about those qualities. He didn't.
Yes he did. He very clearly told the voters that he did not have bat-shit insane polices.
That was the problem.
Yes, because he failed to notice the voters he was talking to were the Republican base, so pointing out the lack of bat-shit insane policies was, in fact, not a good idea.
The Republicans have tried to cloud the issue by removing Medicare, creating an entirely new program and _naming it Medicare_, so I really hope that the name 'Vouchercare' takes off and we can start using that.
The idea that insurance companies are willing to sell insurance to the elderly at all to hilariously laughable. They won't even sell insurance to me, and I assure you, I'm a fuckload less expensive medically than anyone over 60 that I know.
I like the fact that Romney has a 'plan', but Obama only has 'vague numbers'.
In other words, Romney has a goddamn letter to Santa, many point which are completely based on utter nonsense, like the 'Hey, It's Obama's fault that a company that got a loan under Bush's green energy program failed, because that loan was made two weeks into Obama's term'. And 'The problem is all those goddamn teacher unions'. And 'We're going to balance the budget via cutting more programs than actually exist, although we'll carefully not name them because no one would vote for us if we did'.
Whereas Obama has an _actual budget_.
Where's Romney's? And, no, dancing around the Ryan budget doesn't count...if he wants to use that, he can, but he can't stand there pretending he somehow has the magically balanced budget of the Ryan budget, while ignoring the fact it _decimates_ government services.
Mommy, Mommy, the Democrats are using math instead of making random impossible promises about the budget and vague criticisms of the President based on imaginary premises! Make them stop!
I can't wait for the debate, because we appear to be headed for a total meltdown of the Romney campaign, when it is either unable to provide any sort of policy specifications at all, _or_ it provides something like the Ryan plan and people realize 'Holy shit, that thing is for real.'. Either one of those will be _awesome_. (There have been polls that have demonstrated that Americans, when explained the Ryan budget plan, tend to think it's imaginary, because no one would actually propose that stuff.)
If you do, you're not thinking hard enough about your own life and what it would be like without the profit motive of people around you.
Yes, I often wish that people have some sort of profit motive to deny me good and services.
Wait, no I don't.
You realize that the insurance industry has a backwards profit motive of other corporations, right? The _less_ health care I get, the _more_ money they keep.
I can imagine how this would work in a grocery store. Instead of shopping, I give a $200 a week to a third party, a 'food insurer', and in return he promises to feed me enough for a week. (In this universe, sometimes people get supernaturally hungry and start eating $200,000 a year, so this insurance makes sense.)
What sort of food do you think people would end up eating?
I love people who have become so attached to the free market they do not actually understand where different corporations profits comes from, which is a rather important part of actually having a free market. (As most of the problems that need regulation come from where companies start making money on the _wrong things_.)
Insurance companies make money by reducing claims. This is all well and good when they're an art insurance company and they reduce claims by security audits and theft recovery people. It's not good when they're a health insurance company and they reduce claims by...not providing health care and dropping sick people.
There is an actual contract, actual consideration changing hands, and actual case law to help settle differences.
Are you serious?
Have you actually ever used health insurance for anything outside of routine stuff?
You realize we just had to pass a law saying they couldn't drop people from insurance because they got sick, and couldn't make up bogus pre-existing conditions. You realize that, right? You're not just some alien who showed up yesterday on this planet and thinks that health insurance companies actually provide any sort of useful services to people who are seriously ill?
Want to fix things? It sure as hell doesn't start with cutting Defense spending or Social Security. It begins with culling things like those bailouts and things like Solyndra.
You can't actually claim to be serious and then whine about Solyndra. Solyndra is a nonsensical issue brought up mainly in the attempt to make some sort of Obama scandal out of it, although that fell apart when it was pointed out that 99% of that happened under Bush and someone in the DOE authorizing the loan a few days after Obama got in office does not mean Obama had anything to do with it. That's the only reason anyone knows anything about it, the attempt to make it a scandal. That was a $26 billion dollar program to give out loans to energy companies, and a possible loss of $529 million dollars is not particularly important.
And while you can complain about the entire loan program, the fact is, the rest of them are on track to make their loan payments, and hence the program made money even with the Solyndra loss, so that's not a good example either.
And excluding defense spending is crazy. There is absolutely no reason we need to spend anywhere near as much as we spend on defense. We have no actual threats that could be deterred via most defense spending, and no reason to have military bases in 90% of the places we do.
It begins with curtailing what gets spent on Medicaid (Those here illegally get better medical care than the REST of us, including those on Medicare... Meds, glasses, etc. All paid for off of each and everyone's backs...)- and cutting off those that are not really legally entitled to it.
While we _are_ paying for the medical care of those here illegally (Because they go to hospitals and then do not pay, which means we do), I have no idea why you think they get meds and glasses for free.
While that won't fix things, the first item addresses one of the major causes of the "problem". The second forces a re-assessment of things. Might raise your insurance rates, might not. Obamacare will.
Obamacare's _already_ lowered insurance rates, because of the requirement that 80% of premiums go towards care.
The third's based on the premise that the "insurance" scheme we're doing here in the country's more of a scam inflicted on the patients and the doctors. You don't typically get "insurance" on piddly things for your car, right? Why should you do the same thing with health or other insurance?
Erm, while insurance _is_ a scam, it is not a scam for the reason you think it is.
Your health is not 'piddly', and _anyone_ can be hit, _at any time_, by health care costs they can never, in their entire life, pay off.
Treating it as 'insurance' is indeed stupid. But saying 'People could just pay for it themselves' is not very reasonable either, as people clearly _can't_.
This is why health insurance is a scam. Because things that everyone needs, and everyone (except the super-rich) have the possibility of not being able to pay for, is not something that should be left to the private sector at all. It should be right up there with 'police protection', as it's something that individuals who use it cannot actually afford., but something that, society-wide, is something we want.
Insurance is a reasonable idea when it's some sort of custom thing per person. It is entirely reasonable for a museum to insure against loses, and the insurance company comes out and says 'You have to do X, Y, and Z and we'll insure you for this much.'.
It is not any sort of reasonable model when there's an entire segment of society that needs it, and it's even less of a reasonable model everyone needs it, and it's even less of one when failure to have it means everyone else has to pay.If everyone needs it, and the lack of it hurts everyone, then the solution is to just tax people more and _provide_ it, not via any 'insurance' model.
I am suddenly reminded of the 'fire insurance' that some places have started offering, and how
SS used to take more in then it spent. That money was taken by the general fund and spent. It now spends more then it takes in. Have you heard of the baby boom?
That wasn't because of the baby boom, you idiot. That's because we have a recession going on here and unemployed people don't pay payroll taxes, and people retired early. So, until the economy turns around, payouts will exceed revenue for about 5% each year. (And it's not helped by payroll tax holidays.)
Extrapolating revenues and payouts based on our current financial situation is idiotic.
The _actual_ baby-boomer problems hits in 2017, and over the next 20 years, will eventually run out the trust fund.
The trust fund is a lie. Nobody would allow a company to maintain a trust full of its own bonds. It's an even worse idea to let the government do it. All that money will ether come out of the general fund or it will be printed.
Companies maintain separate areas of money all the time, you idiot, and move money around between them all the time. One part of the company doesn't need some of its yearly budget yet, but another part needs it earlier.
And what the fuck does 'out of the general fund' mean? Yes, it's coming 'out of the general fund'. The goddamn general fund borrowed from social security, and social security is taking back the amount it loaned them. ('I can't can't pay back your loan, that money would come straight of out my bank account!' 'Uh, yeah, that's generally where money comes from.')
'The trust fund is a lie' is complete and utter nonsense, spewed by total buffoons who have no idea what words actually mean. The Federal government has two goddamn bank accounts, and has for years been moving stuff from the SS account to the general one, to keep from paying interest on loans to the general ones, and now, when SS runs low, is moving it back. Yes, _of course_ this is going to be a problem, because the government can't balance its budget and SS had been making things better for it, and will no longer do so.
While, indeed, you can choose to steal all the money that people have put in social security by changing the laws, you cannot also complain there is a problem with social security, which is 'People want to steal from it'.
You are people who are running around threatening to rob banks because, in your own words 'It's not safe to put money in banks, because people will steal it'. And hence you have to get all the money _out_ of the banks by stealing it. Problem solved!
You do realize that, under the ACA, that states can essentially opt-out if they have a system that will provide the same level of care? It's called an innovation waiver. Vermont already planning on opting out into their own single-payer, and is trying it done _now_ instead of waiting until the entire ACA kicks in.
The problem with saying 'Let the states do it' is...the states have had a goddamn two decades to do it at this point, pretending the problems with health care first became an issue in 1992. (Of course, that was an issue before that, but let's pretend.)
Some of the states did...and most of them didn't.
If a state wants to come up with their own plan, or even _has_ their own plan currently, and this plan _actually works_ in providing affordable health care to, I dunno, 95% of the residents, and the Federal government makes them do something else, feel free to complain at that point.