I have worked for people that are cheap just for cheap's sake. However, they are that way because they do not understand how much they actually pay for being cheap. However, non-business owning individuals are often the same way. They are so cheap they cut off their nose to spite their own face.
Greed is a problem for all of humanity, not just for business owners for it is greed that causes people to be so cheap they cheat themselves. It arises from human nature. Everyone seems to want something for nothing. Otherwise politicians would get nowhere telling people they are going to give them "free" stuff that those same people end up paying for with taxes.
You have a couple of fallacies in your thinking. The first one? Governments create the marketplace. Governments do not create the marketplace. It exists because people need to live. They produce, buy, sell, barter, etc... because it is how one gets what one needs to survive. Government has nothing to do with that. Government only gets involved because it wants to control what people do. ln other words, the marketplace is a result of human behavior and is a reflection of it. If you have a group of 2 or more people living outside of a government structure there will be, not may be, a marketplace. Why? Because a single person cannot do everything needed to survive. He needs to trade skills, produce, labor, etc... with his neighbors to survive. Economics is, in all reality, the study of human action. Not human motivation, but what people actually do because actual events can be studied and quatified, motivations are much more obscure and subjective. Ludwig von Mises calls it praexology, at least I think that is the correct spelling.
The book I recommended to you on money and banking in the US is a compilation of studies. The first section is on early US history of money and banking which is the section I recommended as it has the same title as the entire compilation. Then a section on the formation of the Federal Reserve. Then other sections on different topics. While they are all related you can read one part and get a complete understanding of that part all by itself.
The fact that you reject ideas just because they do not fit your ideology is not good. Sorry to have to say it, but it does reflect a degree of closemindedness. The only way to really learn is to open your mind to all ideas. You end up with a much greater understanding of issues and much greater wisdom. That said, you still disagree agreeably. I like having this conversation with you, and I cannot say I enjoy very many of my conversations with people from the political left. They often turn into nothing but ad hominen attacks from those who disagree with me. This, you have not done.
I would also recommend "The Road to Serfdom" by Hayek. This is probably one of the most important books of the 20th century as it lays out in clear, concise detail why socialism ends up in what it does. Hayek does a masterful job of documenting what he says. And what he says is the opposite of what you have heard all the way through your academic years, and the opposite of what you will hear from the media. This book has had a profound effect on my understanding of political and economic issues. Even if it doesn't change your mind it will challenge your political beliefs and understandings.
I thought much the same way you do when I was your age. The reason for it was that I had not really studied ecomomics or political philosophy from all sides. Thus I was pretty limited in my understanding of the issues as I had not been exposed to competing ideas. I accepted what I knew because I had not studied anything else. I started reading all sides of the issues at least a decade ago. I've read Marxist thought, libertarian thought, conservative thought, Keynesian (Marxist) economics, and Austrian school economics. I have yet to read Friedman, but only because I haven't been able to afford any of his books as yet.
What is your second fallacy? That the economic principles I'm talking about have never been used successfully. Study the depression of 1920 and 1921. Never heard of it? There is a reason for that. What reason? It was over so fast it was breathtaking and it violates all of what academia says must happen so they do not point to it other than to puzzle why something other than what they think actually worked. Then they conclude some pretty off-the-wall things about that. Why was it so short lived even though the stock market dropped more than it did in 1929? Because Warren G. Harding did the opposite of what all the Keynesian "experts" say the government has to do during economic downturns. His actions, o
As a side note, I too suffer from severe headaches. What I have found that works for me is to eat foods highly spiced with cayenne pepper. The reason cayenne works is that the active ingredient in cayenne is capsicum which is a natural pain reliever. Not a single over-the-counter or prescription medicine has ever worked for me, but cayenne does. I can have a really bad headache and within 15 minutes of eating highly spiced foods the headache is gone. Works every time for me.
There are more peppers than cayenne peppers that work for me. Habeneros work. Also, what ever pepper is found in authentic Thai cooking works really well too. So, if you like spicy foods you might try eating some next time you feel a migraine coming on. May not work for you like it does for me, but cayenne/hot_peppers do not have the same isses all NSAIDs do. Other than the burning sensation, which in time you get used to and actually develop a taste for, the peppers are side-effect free.
This also works for me on arthritis pain too. The days my knees are so bad that I can barely walk I eat a spicy meal and in no time at all my pain levels are reduced 90% or so. I go from hobbling to walking in less than a half hour.
So why then is a political problem being blamed on business? The problem looks to me to be a problem of corrupt politicians, if it truly does exist. Get rid of the corrupt politicians and the problem goes away to a great extent.
This is why I am in favor of limited government. The more power we give politicians, the more power corrupt politicians have over our lives. That to me is the underlying problem.
The more a government interferes with the marketplace the worse economies become. Evidence for this are the countries such as the Soviet Union, Cuba, Red China, North Korea, etc.... These countries absolutely tied the hands of business men. These governments made all decisions of an economic nature. What was the result? Their citizens died of starvation by the millions, and when they didn't absolutely starve they lived in 3rd world conditions.
The reason for this is that no one person, and no small group of people, can understand all the economic factors involved, nor the economic desires and needs of people that they cannot know personally, nor can they respond to conditions at the speed that millions of people making their own decisions can respond. That means things get out of whack in a hurry in a centrally managed economy. And it means that the collective knowledge involved from the millions of people making individual decions in a lassez faire economy is far, far greater than the knowledge of a small group of people making decisions for everyone in the so-called managed capitalism. What happens then in an attempt to manage even moderate parts of an economy? Things slow down. Fewer jobs are created. The central banks and the governments can't figure out what is going wrong so they do things like increased deficit spending. huge stimulus packages based entirely on debt, and manipulation of the currency by printing money and very loose credit policies. A good small book on central banks and the harm they do, in the page range you were asking for, is "A History of Money and Banking in the United States". Google it and you can find it for free in ebook form.
Also, the countries in my first paragraph were very involved in the redistribution of wealth in their societies. Think about that for a while and what kind of economic condition they ended up in. Their dislike of the wealthy business owner destroyed their own economies, and plunged their citizens into untold economic misery. Also, notice that when economic freedom disappeared so did civil and religious liberty. Economic freedom is the foundation upon which all other freedoms are built, even Karl Marx acknowledged this. What he didn't understand is that when you remove economic liberty you destroy the other liberties too.
I don't know if I can give you a recommendation that exactly covers what the Constitution of Liberty covers, but maybe a good intro to it might be "Individualism and Economic Order", once again by Hayek. It's another free resource and you can find it through Google in pdf or epub format.
Mises.org is a very good resource for understanding libertarian thought. They have a ton of free resources on economic issues. That said I wouldn't classify myself as libertarian. I'm more of a libertarian/constitutionalist/conservative mish mash. I read a lot, and have been studying these issues for a decade now. I take a little here, a little there, some more from another place, etc... in forming my own conclusions.
I live in a small town in a very rural community. We are more than 70 miles from a town with with at least 50,000 people. In fact, there is only one town of that size within 100 miles of the eastern border of the state. We have several different ISPs. We have cable, dsl, wireless, and satellite internet services. If it is economically viable in a town of less than 7,000 to have that many ISPs then it is economically viable in much larger communities too. We have lived here for 6 years now, and where we lived before, another small town of similar size we had cable, dsl, wireless and satellite internet service.
So pardon me if I am very skeptical of Wheeler's statement.
This is very possible. Sleep studies done over the last few decades have proven that sleep deprivation results in a lot of health problems. From my own experience with a sleep disorder I can verify that it causes weight gain, long term high blood pressure, and an increased risk of stroke and heart attack.
Over and above those issues even small amounts of sleep deprivation have a large effect on motor skills. Studies have shown that sleep deprivation affects driving skills as much as drinking does. Just like it doesn't take a lot of alcohol to affect driving skills it doesn't take a lot of sleep deprivation to do the same thing.
The first thing I say in response to your quote is: who fact-checked this? Anything coming out of a politician or bureaucrats mouth needs fact checking. Tom Wheeler is a Democrat first and whatever else he his, or has been in his life, comes second. That means he has a particular agenda, like the rest of the politicians in this country, in mind when he makes a statement.
My experience over the years has been that even if something a politician or media person says is something I might agree with I need to fact check the statement before I accept it as true. Politicians are politicians because they like power, and when you like power regulation is very attractive as they can be enacted and then pointed at by the politician as something he has "done" for his constituents, even if the unintended consequences of his action are terrible. And then he will deny that those consequences have anything to do with his actions.
Since honest politicians are about as rare as hen's teeth everything they say must be verified and then looked at to see if what he is pointing at is an unintended consequence from his own or other politician's actions.
Why would the companies be destroyed? That ought to be obvious. To take wealth away from someone you need to take all their assets away and to do that you need to sell off their assents. How much do people pay at a fire sale? Not much. Do you know what a massive dumping of stock would do to the price of those stocks? It would send them into the toilet. And in an economy as fragile as ours is right now that can destroy companies and jobs. And what about those investments that are not made through a public venue? Where someone invests in a small company? How do you manage that? How do you guarantee to the business owner who the wealthy man invested in that the terms of the investment will not change? What if he was given very favorable terms because the investor really belived in the owner? Is someone else likely to do exactly the same thing? I doubt it.
I've known quite a few small businessmen in my life. Very few, if any, of them built their companies on debt. They built their businesses slowly and avoided debt like the plague. Debt is a sure way to destroy a startup company because it automatically increases the expenses the company has, and until that company is in a profitable and stable condition debt will kill it. A lot of startups go belly up and debt is a big reason they do. Do not believe all the ads you see from credit card companies as debt being the way out and the only way to expand. They, the credit card companies, want to get their hands on as much of that business owners money as they can, and they are pretty much assured of getting their money back if the business fails because of the assets the business owns. They could care less how many small businesses they run into the ground. Large corporations are not the friend of the small business owner.
Being dependent upon anyone is not a position I would willingly choose to be in.
I would much rather get my insulin from the people who make profit off of it than I would be to have the government force society to pay for it. There is a huge philosophical issue here. When the government takes the money from the taxpayer it takes it at what is ultimately the point of the government's gun. When the company that makes the product gives it away to those who cannot afford it it harms no one and no one is coerced into anything. That lack of coercion is a very big deal to me.
I am not an anarchist. There is a role for government to play. It needs to make sure that the rights of all of its citizens are respected. As an example, the federal government needs to protect the country from outside aggression. The founding fathers set us up to have a very limited federal government. It's role was clearly defined, and all other necessary governance issues and powers were left at the state level. I would recommend Alexis de Toqueville's books as a very good primer on the history of how our government was set up and how it operated in the very early 1800's. "American Institutions and Their Influence" is a pretty good summary of Democracy in America vols 1 and 2.
Government redistribution of wealth is the antithesis of liberty. When the government can come in and say, we don't like how much money you made so we are going to take it away from you by force, that is blatant coercion by the state. That is well down the road to totalitarianism. I totally reject the idea that anyone has a right to reach into another person's pockets and take their property away from them, other than in cases of blatant theft or fraud. To do it just for political ideals is authoritarianism at its worst. It is the destruction of personal liberty for it removes economic liberty from the populace.
I would say that right here we ought to discuss what liberty actually means for there is a lot of sophistry floating around in the name of liberty that is not actually liberty. These sophistries were introduced back in the early to mid 20th century.
To understand my point of view on liberty I would recommend Freiderich Hayek's book "The Constitution of Liberty", as a format like this is probably the worst possible place to have a real discussion of such complex issues.
The healthcare issue is the issue that is at the very heart of the matter right now, at least for me. Why? Because Obamacare and single payer healthcare both require government coercion to work. You take away coercion and it all falls flat on its face.
I must congratulate you on your attitude.. We disagree on some pretty big issues, but you have not been disagreeable. This is pretty rare in my experience online. Thank you for your good attitude.
I don't have the money to "hit my maximum out of pocket". Deductibles and premiums alone are far more than I can pay.
What I do right now is get my insulin from the manufacturer on their low income plan. If your income is above medicaid elgible yet below $40K for a married couple they will supply you for free. I go to the doctor twice a year so they can keep on writing my prescriptions. It's all I can afford. I don't want anyone else's interference.
If I die, I die. We all have to go sometime. What I don't want is the rest of the country paying for me. In my book you make your own way or else. No one is responsible for me but me. If I fail, I fail. My problem, my consequences. That's the way life has always been. And the reverse is true too. When I suceed I don't want the government taking from me to give to someone else who may or may not give a rip about standing on their own two feet and supporting themselves. When I worked I helped others out of my love for people. I didn't tell them to go to the government. I took personal responsibility for what I could afford to do. I have given entire paychecks to help those who were worse off than I was, and it was no big deal to me to give someone the last money I had to someone who needed it more than I did. But, and it is a huge but, I would not help the guy that didn't want to work but could. He was on his own. If all he wanted to do was get drunk and get high, let him get that way, but I was never going to help him finance his self-destruction. I would feed a hungry man but I wouldn't just stick money in his hand to go waste on something other than food.
It's a soul destroying idea that everyone else, the government, is responsible for the success or failure of the individual. To make people dependent upon government destroys ambition, drive, self-respect, and much more. You might want to read the autobiographies of me such as Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. They came out of slavery to succeed. They understood that someone else paying their bills, supporting them, was the anathema of self respect. Those guys were men in the highest sense of the word.
I'll quote Frederick Douglass on this idea and I agree with him fully. I apply the same to myself. Let me alone. Let me stand on my own two feet. Keep the government out of my life. I don't want its intrusion and "help".
"Everybody has asked the question. .."What shall we do with the Negro?" I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature's plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!"
The subsidies for my wife and I are close to $800/month. At that my premium is still way out of my ability to pay for it. Just to pay premiums alone would mean no grocery money. It is like that for millions of people. I know people who pay more than $1000/month even with their subsidies. Obamacare is no panacea.
If you're a diabetic you pay all that money per month and insurance will cover less than half the cost of your insulin. An medication that requires injection has extremely high copays. Even a gold plan would leave me with more than $500/month in insulin costs. You do not see these things until you research these plans in depth.
Leaving British healthcare out of it, and which I have done a lot of research into, the VA is a typical US government intrusion into healthcare. It is inefficient, corrupt, and next to impossible to change. The Republicans just voted a bill through that is supposed to allow VA management to be able to fire lousy managers and employees, but I doubt much will come from it. I worked for the VA for 2 years back in the 90's, and it was culture shock for me. I had spent all my working life in the private sector and what I saw there left me extremely skeptical of government institutions. The corruption was unbelievable. They routinely paid two or three times for companies to build the same parts because the first parts they got were out of spec. They just wouldn't work,. So instead of telling the company the part was unusable and they wouldn't pay for it they would ask them to build another at full price once again. Who was getting the kickbacks I don't know. But it was fraudulent as all get out.
Their technician who was supposed to be doing the job I did was useless. He could not do his job. The VA, before I went to work there, routinely had to call in outside contractors to fix his screwups. They were paying tens of thousands a year to outside contractors while this guy walked around the hospital campus carrying his tool belt and doing nothing. He spent at least half his day in the library reading while I was doing the jobs he said he had already done.
Some of his failures could have been deadly to patients. He would be given work orders to clean the condensate drain pans in the walk-in meat cooler for the hospital's kitchen, and he would faithfully fill them out as being done and having taken so much time every time he did them. I got sent to do that job one time and he hadn't actually done the work in years. That drain pan had 2" sidewalls, and it was ready to overflow with mold and slime. It hadn't been cleaned for so long, and the slime was so toxic, that the slime had actually eaten through the stainless steel pan in 10 or 15 places. The pan didn't leak until after i cleaned it because the slime was so deep and so dense the water never touched the pan. What did management do when I showed them they had to buy a new drain pan because it had never actually been cleaned for years? They laughed, and yet all that mold and slime could easily have contaminated all the meat in that locker and sickened a whole lot of patients.
The guy whose job I had to do was not the only one not doing his job on campus. There were a lot of drones there that did absolutely nothing, and were proud of it. Management knew they did nothing because they had to hire extra people to do the work they were supposed to be doing, and management never did a thing about it. They said it was "too hard" to fire anyone.
I went to the chief engineer one time and asked him why they kept the drone on whose job I was doing. I told him, I'm not out to try to cause trouble, but I simply do not understand how you can keep on paying this guy's wages. If he was in private industry he wouldn't last a week as everything he touched would be a call-back. The chief engineer's mouth opened and closed a few times with no sound coming out of it, and he finally said, Well, I guess we've never actually had anyone who knew what they were doing before you came. He never actual
And after their wealth, companies, and probably 10's of thousands of jobs have been destroyed? Then what? What next? Go after the next level of wealth and destroy it along with jobs, companies, and the economy? It's what I would call cutting off your nose to spite your face.
I have never gotten a job working for a poor man. Never has happened. I started my first job in 1967 and worked until 1999 when I got hurt and could no longer work. In those 32 years not a single poor man ever hired me. But then not a single poor man that I know/have_known, has ever owned a business that hires people to work for it.
When you destroy wealth, you destroy all opportunity for people to lift themselves out of poverty by having a job. As someone who is now forced to live off social security I can tell you it is NOT a way to get out of poverty. It is enforced poverty.
You could take every penny every billionaire in the US has and it wouldn't make a dent in our debt. Anyone who really believes this idea that taxing the rich will solve our financial woes is pretty much living in fantasy land.
You add up all the wealth of all the billionaires in the US and what do you have? $100 billion? That isn't even a tiny patch on our debt, or our yearly spending. We spend 3-400 times that in federal spending every year. Trump's proposed budget is $4.2 trillion including both discretionary and non-discretionary spending. And what is that $100 billion against our published national debt? It's.5% of our national debt, not counting our unpaid liabilities. Then its an even far more miniscule percentage:.05% of our total debt.
Taxing the rich into oblivion will never fix our economic issues. The only thing that will fix them is reducing government spending, reducing business regulation by the government so that business can actually grow and create jobs again. No economic growth means no solving of our economic problems, and futher growth of the income disparity and the number of people living below the poverty line.
Well, if you cut 100% of the defense budget and applied it to the costs of single payer health care there would still be, conservatively, $2.6 trillion over and above current federal spending and we would still be borrowing far more than 4 out of ever 10 dollars the federal government spends. The numbers don't lie. It isn't economically feasible.
And, to tell the truth, I think Britain's health care system is lousy. Surgeons going to lunch with an anesthetized patient still lying on the operating table, nurses rolling dying patients out into the hallway to die because there is no place to put them, etc.... That is unacceptable to me, but that is what always comes from the government sticking its inefficient nose in places it doesn't belong. What we would have is very much like the massively corrupt VA hospital system where people would die and administrators would simply lie about it and cover it up. No thanks.
Everything associated with health care that the federal government is involved in has massive problems with fraud. Medicare and Medicaid both knowingly pay out hundreds of millions of dollars a year in fraudulent claims. Think how much that would grow if 100% of health care was government controlled. And don't tell me that would not happen, for it is a historical fact that this always happens in government run programs and I see no reason to think that human behavior will suddenly change.
LOL. Am I old? Yup. No doubt about it. I've seen a lot of water go under the bridge. However, my situation isn't my gripe. My gripe is what is being done to this great nation of ours, how it is being torn apart at the seams.
The economy is doing great? Really? shadowstats.com proves we have 22% unemployment, 10% inflation, and have been in a contracting, not expanding, economy since 2001. Yup. A very good economy. Or do you just accept at face value everything the government tells you? You know, all those virtuous honest politicians who would never promise what they cannot deliver or say one thing and do another. Not a politician in the US who would ever do that, is there?
BTW, shadowstats.com is not the only economist/financial expert who has shown we are no better off economically than we were in the middle of the Great Depression. Guess you're just so young you've never actually experienced a truly prosperous America....
Apparently not. If they did they you wouldn't see all the Trump hating going on for they would realize that Trump is doing some good things. He is trying to restart our economy in an economically viable way. He is creating jobs, only it will take a while for all of this to show up. And he is doing it without big expenditures of our money.... You know, big "stimulus packages" that only create inflation because they are nothing more than printing money that has no basis other than more debt.
All that said, I didn't vote for Trump. I still do not trust the man. But, credit is due where credit is due. He is doing some good things to help the little guy.
The government has so tied up business with regulation that it sucks trillions of dollars a year out of the economy. Since Obamacare went into effect the vast majority of jobs created have been part time and temporary jobs so the employer wouldn't get hit with the costs of Obamacare. The other problem is the QE that the Fed started under Obama. They have been printing over $80 billion/month and sending it straight to the stock market. One of the laws of economics is that the more currency there is floating around the higher prices will go--inflation. In other words, the Obama administration and Fed have been stealing from us through inflation at a fantastic rate as every time the dollar is devalued what its purchasing power drops. And who gets stuck with that? All of us.
Oh, the government tells us inflation is low, but who really believes that? My food costs have risen from less than $300/month to more than $500/month in less than 3 years and my food buying habits haven't changed at all.. Much of this is hidden price increases. Take cottage cheese for instance. It used to be sold by the quart--32 ounces. Now it is in a 24 ounce container. That alone is a 25% increase in cost. It doesn't even take account of how much the price/container has risen. Many other products have had the same thing happen. I used to buy grapfruit juice for $3.25/half gallon. Now its a few pennies higher, but the carton has been reduced in size 9%. Noticed the reduction in size of potato chip bags? Candy bar sizes and prices? The rise in meat prices? However, when the government figures food price inflation they count only the cost of the container. They ignore the size of the container. Easy way to lie about inflation.
A week or two ago Trump rolled back a bunch of regulations Obama had put in place just before he left office. The Democrats screamed about it, but those regulations alone would have drained about $2 trillion/yr out of the economy. He also rolled back the permitting process for things like road and bridge building/reconstruction. He had a report that a road contractor had given him that had cost the contractor 5 years and $24 million to make. The cost of the report was in the neighborhood of $7000/page. And the contractor still couldn't build his 18 miles of road under our current regulatory structure.
The MSM didn't cover these things at all that I know of. Why? Because these are things that Trump is doing that will start the economy to move again. If they did cover it they did it in a way to ignore how this will affect job creation in a positive way.
I don't know if you have ever seen the shadowstats.com website. The guy who is the brains behind it looks at the US economy the way the government used to look at it 30 to 40 years ago. He figures inflation, unemployment, the value of the dollar, the gdp, etc... the same way the federal government used to before they began manipulating the numbers. You ought to take a look at the site. It's a real education. We are at, financially speaking, the same point we were in the 1930's economically, only we have been in a negative growth period, depression in other words, since 2001. He has publicly available charts on our economy on the site that anyone can look at for free..
I'm married. My wife lost her job a few years back due to the badly slumping economy and hasn't been able to find a job that pays anything close to what she used to make. She makes less than 50% of her former salary.
Under Obamacare my premiums have gone through the roof. Two years ago, if I would have been able to afford it, my premiums would have been $257/month with a $3500 deductible. That is basically $6600/yr. On top of that my medications would have cost me another $500/month over and above the copays and what the insurance would cover. That is $12,600/yr on less than $25,000/yr income. I'm disabled if you want to know the reason for the low income.
This year, if I had actually puchased a plan my monthly payment would have been $450/month, with a $6000/yr deductible. Add to that the costs of my medications over and above the copays and insurance coverage of $600/month and it comes to a right tidy percentage of our yearly income. Our yearly costs would have been a minimum of $18,600. That doesn't cost any possible hospitalization costs or what I have to pay for specialists visits which have a copay of $100/visit. I'm supposed to buy that on a total income of less than $30000/yr. In fact, the government will fine me for not having spent 62% of our total income on health insurance premiums, deductibles, and copays.
Let's look at single payer insurance. California has 39 million residents. They figured single payer costs of $400 billion/yr. That is twice California's current total yearly revenue. Let's just say Caliifornia has 40 milllion residents to make a nice round number. And let's figure that the US has 320 million citizens. One is over estimated slightly and the other under estimated slightly. That makes the California population 1/8 of the US population. That means that a conservative estimate of single payer insurance costs for the entire us to $3.2 trillion dollars. That's approximately 75% of current total federal government spending.
Since the federal government already borrows $4 out of ever $10 it spends just where do you see the money to pay for a single payer system coming from? And just how sustainable are the federal government's current spending habits, let alone with a 75% increase in federal spending?
Also, do you understand that the current published federal debt of around $20 trillion is peanuts compared to what it owes in unfunded liabilities such as pension plans, future payments for current entitlement programs, etc...? In 2010 our unfunded liabilities were around $120-$140 trillion. Meaning if the feds had cut spending enough to begin paying that down at $1 trillion/yr it would have taken us well over a century to pay our debts? Our current unfunded liabilities have been estimated in the $200 trillion range. In other words paying them off with a federal budget that is $1 trillion in the black ever year would take us two centuries to pay the debt.
I have often wondered at people who claim to do 4 or 5 things at once. How do they ever get anything done, especially if they are doing complex tasks?
It has been my experience over my lifetime that any time I am interrupted doing a complex task that when I go back to it my first thoughts are, Ok, where was I? What was I doing? To get back to where I was before being interrupted takes time, and the more interruptions there are the worse the problem gets. If you have tools you're working with it gets worse as you have to locate the tool you had in hand, and often it has been laid down while my brain is occupied with the interruption so that I have no recollection where I laid it down.
If I'm interrupted writing out a complex thought the problem is even more wasteful of time for then I have to completely rebuild my thought process. The longer a person can concentrate on a single task the more they can accomplish as they become far more efficient the deeper their concentration levels become.
I'm married to a woman who has a very hard time doing one job at a time. She stops doing one task to do another at least a half dozen times before she finishes the original task she started. As a result it takes her forever to do anything. A job that should take her 15 minutes will often not be completed for a couple of hours, and then she has a bunch of other partially completed tasks on her hands. And she wonders why it takes her so long to get anything done.
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I have worked for people that are cheap just for cheap's sake. However, they are that way because they do not understand how much they actually pay for being cheap. However, non-business owning individuals are often the same way. They are so cheap they cut off their nose to spite their own face.
Greed is a problem for all of humanity, not just for business owners for it is greed that causes people to be so cheap they cheat themselves. It arises from human nature. Everyone seems to want something for nothing. Otherwise politicians would get nowhere telling people they are going to give them "free" stuff that those same people end up paying for with taxes.
If I still had some moderator points I would mod this up.
Who cares what someone else's user name is? Only the petty and the spiteful.
You have a couple of fallacies in your thinking. The first one? Governments create the marketplace. Governments do not create the marketplace. It exists because people need to live. They produce, buy, sell, barter, etc... because it is how one gets what one needs to survive. Government has nothing to do with that. Government only gets involved because it wants to control what people do. ln other words, the marketplace is a result of human behavior and is a reflection of it. If you have a group of 2 or more people living outside of a government structure there will be, not may be, a marketplace. Why? Because a single person cannot do everything needed to survive. He needs to trade skills, produce, labor, etc... with his neighbors to survive. Economics is, in all reality, the study of human action. Not human motivation, but what people actually do because actual events can be studied and quatified, motivations are much more obscure and subjective. Ludwig von Mises calls it praexology, at least I think that is the correct spelling.
The book I recommended to you on money and banking in the US is a compilation of studies. The first section is on early US history of money and banking which is the section I recommended as it has the same title as the entire compilation. Then a section on the formation of the Federal Reserve. Then other sections on different topics. While they are all related you can read one part and get a complete understanding of that part all by itself.
The fact that you reject ideas just because they do not fit your ideology is not good. Sorry to have to say it, but it does reflect a degree of closemindedness. The only way to really learn is to open your mind to all ideas. You end up with a much greater understanding of issues and much greater wisdom. That said, you still disagree agreeably. I like having this conversation with you, and I cannot say I enjoy very many of my conversations with people from the political left. They often turn into nothing but ad hominen attacks from those who disagree with me. This, you have not done.
I would also recommend "The Road to Serfdom" by Hayek. This is probably one of the most important books of the 20th century as it lays out in clear, concise detail why socialism ends up in what it does. Hayek does a masterful job of documenting what he says. And what he says is the opposite of what you have heard all the way through your academic years, and the opposite of what you will hear from the media. This book has had a profound effect on my understanding of political and economic issues. Even if it doesn't change your mind it will challenge your political beliefs and understandings.
I thought much the same way you do when I was your age. The reason for it was that I had not really studied ecomomics or political philosophy from all sides. Thus I was pretty limited in my understanding of the issues as I had not been exposed to competing ideas. I accepted what I knew because I had not studied anything else. I started reading all sides of the issues at least a decade ago. I've read Marxist thought, libertarian thought, conservative thought, Keynesian (Marxist) economics, and Austrian school economics. I have yet to read Friedman, but only because I haven't been able to afford any of his books as yet.
What is your second fallacy? That the economic principles I'm talking about have never been used successfully. Study the depression of 1920 and 1921. Never heard of it? There is a reason for that. What reason? It was over so fast it was breathtaking and it violates all of what academia says must happen so they do not point to it other than to puzzle why something other than what they think actually worked. Then they conclude some pretty off-the-wall things about that. Why was it so short lived even though the stock market dropped more than it did in 1929? Because Warren G. Harding did the opposite of what all the Keynesian "experts" say the government has to do during economic downturns. His actions, o
As a side note, I too suffer from severe headaches. What I have found that works for me is to eat foods highly spiced with cayenne pepper. The reason cayenne works is that the active ingredient in cayenne is capsicum which is a natural pain reliever. Not a single over-the-counter or prescription medicine has ever worked for me, but cayenne does. I can have a really bad headache and within 15 minutes of eating highly spiced foods the headache is gone. Works every time for me.
There are more peppers than cayenne peppers that work for me. Habeneros work. Also, what ever pepper is found in authentic Thai cooking works really well too. So, if you like spicy foods you might try eating some next time you feel a migraine coming on. May not work for you like it does for me, but cayenne/hot_peppers do not have the same isses all NSAIDs do. Other than the burning sensation, which in time you get used to and actually develop a taste for, the peppers are side-effect free.
This also works for me on arthritis pain too. The days my knees are so bad that I can barely walk I eat a spicy meal and in no time at all my pain levels are reduced 90% or so. I go from hobbling to walking in less than a half hour.
So why then is a political problem being blamed on business? The problem looks to me to be a problem of corrupt politicians, if it truly does exist.
Get rid of the corrupt politicians and the problem goes away to a great extent.
This is why I am in favor of limited government. The more power we give politicians, the more power corrupt politicians have over our lives. That to me is the underlying problem.
The more a government interferes with the marketplace the worse economies become. Evidence for this are the countries such as the Soviet Union, Cuba, Red China, North Korea, etc.... These countries absolutely tied the hands of business men. These governments made all decisions of an economic nature. What was the result? Their citizens died of starvation by the millions, and when they didn't absolutely starve they lived in 3rd world conditions.
The reason for this is that no one person, and no small group of people, can understand all the economic factors involved, nor the economic desires and needs of people that they cannot know personally, nor can they respond to conditions at the speed that millions of people making their own decisions can respond. That means things get out of whack in a hurry in a centrally managed economy. And it means that the collective knowledge involved from the millions of people making individual decions in a lassez faire economy is far, far greater than the knowledge of a small group of people making decisions for everyone in the so-called managed capitalism. What happens then in an attempt to manage even moderate parts of an economy? Things slow down. Fewer jobs are created. The central banks and the governments can't figure out what is going wrong so they do things like increased deficit spending. huge stimulus packages based entirely on debt, and manipulation of the currency by printing money and very loose credit policies. A good small book on central banks and the harm they do, in the page range you were asking for, is "A History of Money and Banking in the United States". Google it and you can find it for free in ebook form.
Also, the countries in my first paragraph were very involved in the redistribution of wealth in their societies. Think about that for a while and what kind of economic condition they ended up in. Their dislike of the wealthy business owner destroyed their own economies, and plunged their citizens into untold economic misery. Also, notice that when economic freedom disappeared so did civil and religious liberty. Economic freedom is the foundation upon which all other freedoms are built, even Karl Marx acknowledged this. What he didn't understand is that when you remove economic liberty you destroy the other liberties too.
I don't know if I can give you a recommendation that exactly covers what the Constitution of Liberty covers, but maybe a good intro to it might be "Individualism and Economic Order", once again by Hayek. It's another free resource and you can find it through Google in pdf or epub format.
Mises.org is a very good resource for understanding libertarian thought. They have a ton of free resources on economic issues. That said I wouldn't classify myself as libertarian. I'm more of a libertarian/constitutionalist/conservative mish mash. I read a lot, and have been studying these issues for a decade now. I take a little here, a little there, some more from another place, etc... in forming my own conclusions.
I live in a small town in a very rural community. We are more than 70 miles from a town with with at least 50,000 people. In fact, there is only one town of that size within 100 miles of the eastern border of the state. We have several different ISPs. We have cable, dsl, wireless, and satellite internet services. If it is economically viable in a town of less than 7,000 to have that many ISPs then it is economically viable in much larger communities too. We have lived here for 6 years now, and where we lived before, another small town of similar size we had cable, dsl, wireless and satellite internet service.
So pardon me if I am very skeptical of Wheeler's statement.
Don't we have enough pop in our culture already?
This is very possible. Sleep studies done over the last few decades have proven that sleep deprivation results in a lot of health problems. From my own experience with a sleep disorder I can verify that it causes weight gain, long term high blood pressure, and an increased risk of stroke and heart attack.
Over and above those issues even small amounts of sleep deprivation have a large effect on motor skills. Studies have shown that sleep deprivation affects driving skills as much as drinking does. Just like it doesn't take a lot of alcohol to affect driving skills it doesn't take a lot of sleep deprivation to do the same thing.
The first thing I say in response to your quote is: who fact-checked this? Anything coming out of a politician or bureaucrats mouth needs fact checking. Tom Wheeler is a Democrat first and whatever else he his, or has been in his life, comes second. That means he has a particular agenda, like the rest of the politicians in this country, in mind when he makes a statement.
My experience over the years has been that even if something a politician or media person says is something I might agree with I need to fact check the statement before I accept it as true. Politicians are politicians because they like power, and when you like power regulation is very attractive as they can be enacted and then pointed at by the politician as something he has "done" for his constituents, even if the unintended consequences of his action are terrible. And then he will deny that those consequences have anything to do with his actions.
Since honest politicians are about as rare as hen's teeth everything they say must be verified and then looked at to see if what he is pointing at is an unintended consequence from his own or other politician's actions.
Why would the companies be destroyed? That ought to be obvious. To take wealth away from someone you need to take all their assets away and to do that you need to sell off their assents. How much do people pay at a fire sale? Not much. Do you know what a massive dumping of stock would do to the price of those stocks? It would send them into the toilet. And in an economy as fragile as ours is right now that can destroy companies and jobs. And what about those investments that are not made through a public venue? Where someone invests in a small company? How do you manage that? How do you guarantee to the business owner who the wealthy man invested in that the terms of the investment will not change? What if he was given very favorable terms because the investor really belived in the owner? Is someone else likely to do exactly the same thing? I doubt it.
I've known quite a few small businessmen in my life. Very few, if any, of them built their companies on debt. They built their businesses slowly and avoided debt like the plague. Debt is a sure way to destroy a startup company because it automatically increases the expenses the company has, and until that company is in a profitable and stable condition debt will kill it. A lot of startups go belly up and debt is a big reason they do. Do not believe all the ads you see from credit card companies as debt being the way out and the only way to expand. They, the credit card companies, want to get their hands on as much of that business owners money as they can, and they are pretty much assured of getting their money back if the business fails because of the assets the business owns. They could care less how many small businesses they run into the ground. Large corporations are not the friend of the small business owner.
Being dependent upon anyone is not a position I would willingly choose to be in.
I would much rather get my insulin from the people who make profit off of it than I would be to have the government force society to pay for it. There is a huge philosophical issue here. When the government takes the money from the taxpayer it takes it at what is ultimately the point of the government's gun. When the company that makes the product gives it away to those who cannot afford it it harms no one and no one is coerced into anything. That lack of coercion is a very big deal to me.
I am not an anarchist. There is a role for government to play. It needs to make sure that the rights of all of its citizens are respected. As an example, the federal government needs to protect the country from outside aggression. The founding fathers set us up to have a very limited federal government. It's role was clearly defined, and all other necessary governance issues and powers were left at the state level. I would recommend Alexis de Toqueville's books as a very good primer on the history of how our government was set up and how it operated in the very early 1800's. "American Institutions and Their Influence" is a pretty good summary of Democracy in America vols 1 and 2.
Government redistribution of wealth is the antithesis of liberty. When the government can come in and say, we don't like how much money you made so we are going to take it away from you by force, that is blatant coercion by the state. That is well down the road to totalitarianism. I totally reject the idea that anyone has a right to reach into another person's pockets and take their property away from them, other than in cases of blatant theft or fraud. To do it just for political ideals is authoritarianism at its worst. It is the destruction of personal liberty for it removes economic liberty from the populace.
I would say that right here we ought to discuss what liberty actually means for there is a lot of sophistry floating around in the name of liberty that is not actually liberty. These sophistries were introduced back in the early to mid 20th century.
To understand my point of view on liberty I would recommend Freiderich Hayek's book "The Constitution of Liberty", as a format like this is probably the worst possible place to have a real discussion of such complex issues.
The healthcare issue is the issue that is at the very heart of the matter right now, at least for me. Why? Because Obamacare and single payer healthcare both require government coercion to work. You take away coercion and it all falls flat on its face.
I must congratulate you on your attitude.. We disagree on some pretty big issues, but you have not been disagreeable. This is pretty rare in my experience online. Thank you for your good attitude.
I don't have the money to "hit my maximum out of pocket". Deductibles and premiums alone are far more than I can pay.
What I do right now is get my insulin from the manufacturer on their low income plan. If your income is above medicaid elgible yet below $40K for a married couple they will supply you for free. I go to the doctor twice a year so they can keep on writing my prescriptions. It's all I can afford. I don't want anyone else's interference.
If I die, I die. We all have to go sometime. What I don't want is the rest of the country paying for me. In my book you make your own way or else. No one is responsible for me but me. If I fail, I fail. My problem, my consequences. That's the way life has always been. And the reverse is true too. When I suceed I don't want the government taking from me to give to someone else who may or may not give a rip about standing on their own two feet and supporting themselves. When I worked I helped others out of my love for people. I didn't tell them to go to the government. I took personal responsibility for what I could afford to do. I have given entire paychecks to help those who were worse off than I was, and it was no big deal to me to give someone the last money I had to someone who needed it more than I did. But, and it is a huge but, I would not help the guy that didn't want to work but could. He was on his own. If all he wanted to do was get drunk and get high, let him get that way, but I was never going to help him finance his self-destruction. I would feed a hungry man but I wouldn't just stick money in his hand to go waste on something other than food.
It's a soul destroying idea that everyone else, the government, is responsible for the success or failure of the individual. To make people dependent upon government destroys ambition, drive, self-respect, and much more. You might want to read the autobiographies of me such as Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. They came out of slavery to succeed. They understood that someone else paying their bills, supporting them, was the anathema of self respect. Those guys were men in the highest sense of the word.
I'll quote Frederick Douglass on this idea and I agree with him fully. I apply the same to myself. Let me alone. Let me stand on my own two feet. Keep the government out of my life. I don't want its intrusion and "help".
"Everybody has asked the question. . ."What shall we do with the Negro?" I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature's plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!"
--Frederick Douglass
The subsidies for my wife and I are close to $800/month. At that my premium is still way out of my ability to pay for it. Just to pay premiums alone would mean no grocery money. It is like that for millions of people. I know people who pay more than $1000/month even with their subsidies. Obamacare is no panacea.
If you're a diabetic you pay all that money per month and insurance will cover less than half the cost of your insulin. An medication that requires injection has extremely high copays. Even a gold plan would leave me with more than $500/month in insulin costs. You do not see these things until you research these plans in depth.
Leaving British healthcare out of it, and which I have done a lot of research into, the VA is a typical US government intrusion into healthcare. It is inefficient, corrupt, and next to impossible to change. The Republicans just voted a bill through that is supposed to allow VA management to be able to fire lousy managers and employees, but I doubt much will come from it. I worked for the VA for 2 years back in the 90's, and it was culture shock for me. I had spent all my working life in the private sector and what I saw there left me extremely skeptical of government institutions. The corruption was unbelievable. They routinely paid two or three times for companies to build the same parts because the first parts they got were out of spec. They just wouldn't work,. So instead of telling the company the part was unusable and they wouldn't pay for it they would ask them to build another at full price once again. Who was getting the kickbacks I don't know. But it was fraudulent as all get out.
Their technician who was supposed to be doing the job I did was useless. He could not do his job. The VA, before I went to work there, routinely had to call in outside contractors to fix his screwups. They were paying tens of thousands a year to outside contractors while this guy walked around the hospital campus carrying his tool belt and doing nothing. He spent at least half his day in the library reading while I was doing the jobs he said he had already done.
Some of his failures could have been deadly to patients. He would be given work orders to clean the condensate drain pans in the walk-in meat cooler for the hospital's kitchen, and he would faithfully fill them out as being done and having taken so much time every time he did them. I got sent to do that job one time and he hadn't actually done the work in years. That drain pan had 2" sidewalls, and it was ready to overflow with mold and slime. It hadn't been cleaned for so long, and the slime was so toxic, that the slime had actually eaten through the stainless steel pan in 10 or 15 places. The pan didn't leak until after i cleaned it because the slime was so deep and so dense the water never touched the pan. What did management do when I showed them they had to buy a new drain pan because it had never actually been cleaned for years? They laughed, and yet all that mold and slime could easily have contaminated all the meat in that locker and sickened a whole lot of patients.
The guy whose job I had to do was not the only one not doing his job on campus. There were a lot of drones there that did absolutely nothing, and were proud of it. Management knew they did nothing because they had to hire extra people to do the work they were supposed to be doing, and management never did a thing about it. They said it was "too hard" to fire anyone.
I went to the chief engineer one time and asked him why they kept the drone on whose job I was doing. I told him, I'm not out to try to cause trouble, but I simply do not understand how you can keep on paying this guy's wages. If he was in private industry he wouldn't last a week as everything he touched would be a call-back. The chief engineer's mouth opened and closed a few times with no sound coming out of it, and he finally said, Well, I guess we've never actually had anyone who knew what they were doing before you came. He never actual
And after their wealth, companies, and probably 10's of thousands of jobs have been destroyed? Then what? What next? Go after the next level of wealth and destroy it along with jobs, companies, and the economy? It's what I would call cutting off your nose to spite your face.
I have never gotten a job working for a poor man. Never has happened. I started my first job in 1967 and worked until 1999 when I got hurt and could no longer work. In those 32 years not a single poor man ever hired me. But then not a single poor man that I know/have_known, has ever owned a business that hires people to work for it.
When you destroy wealth, you destroy all opportunity for people to lift themselves out of poverty by having a job. As someone who is now forced to live off social security I can tell you it is NOT a way to get out of poverty. It is enforced poverty.
You could take every penny every billionaire in the US has and it wouldn't make a dent in our debt. Anyone who really believes this idea that taxing the rich will solve our financial woes is pretty much living in fantasy land.
You add up all the wealth of all the billionaires in the US and what do you have? $100 billion? That isn't even a tiny patch on our debt, or our yearly spending. We spend 3-400 times that in federal spending every year. Trump's proposed budget is $4.2 trillion including both discretionary and non-discretionary spending. And what is that $100 billion against our published national debt? It's .5% of our national debt, not counting our unpaid liabilities. Then its an even far more miniscule percentage: .05% of our total debt.
Taxing the rich into oblivion will never fix our economic issues. The only thing that will fix them is reducing government spending, reducing business regulation by the government so that business can actually grow and create jobs again. No economic growth means no solving of our economic problems, and futher growth of the income disparity and the number of people living below the poverty line.
Well, if you cut 100% of the defense budget and applied it to the costs of single payer health care there would still be, conservatively, $2.6 trillion over and above current federal spending and we would still be borrowing far more than 4 out of ever 10 dollars the federal government spends. The numbers don't lie. It isn't economically feasible.
And, to tell the truth, I think Britain's health care system is lousy. Surgeons going to lunch with an anesthetized patient still lying on the operating table, nurses rolling dying patients out into the hallway to die because there is no place to put them, etc.... That is unacceptable to me, but that is what always comes from the government sticking its inefficient nose in places it doesn't belong. What we would have is very much like the massively corrupt VA hospital system where people would die and administrators would simply lie about it and cover it up. No thanks.
Everything associated with health care that the federal government is involved in has massive problems with fraud. Medicare and Medicaid both knowingly pay out hundreds of millions of dollars a year in fraudulent claims. Think how much that would grow if 100% of health care was government controlled. And don't tell me that would not happen, for it is a historical fact that this always happens in government run programs and I see no reason to think that human behavior will suddenly change.
LOL. Am I old? Yup. No doubt about it. I've seen a lot of water go under the bridge. However, my situation isn't my gripe. My gripe is what is being done to this great nation of ours, how it is being torn apart at the seams.
The economy is doing great? Really? shadowstats.com proves we have 22% unemployment, 10% inflation, and have been in a contracting, not expanding, economy since 2001. Yup. A very good economy. Or do you just accept at face value everything the government tells you? You know, all those virtuous honest politicians who would never promise what they cannot deliver or say one thing and do another. Not a politician in the US who would ever do that, is there?
BTW, shadowstats.com is not the only economist/financial expert who has shown we are no better off economically than we were in the middle of the Great Depression. Guess you're just so young you've never actually experienced a truly prosperous America....
Apparently not. If they did they you wouldn't see all the Trump hating going on for they would realize that Trump is doing some good things. He is trying to restart our economy in an economically viable way. He is creating jobs, only it will take a while for all of this to show up. And he is doing it without big expenditures of our money.... You know, big "stimulus packages" that only create inflation because they are nothing more than printing money that has no basis other than more debt.
All that said, I didn't vote for Trump. I still do not trust the man. But, credit is due where credit is due. He is doing some good things to help the little guy.
That isn't really the problem.
The government has so tied up business with regulation that it sucks trillions of dollars a year out of the economy. Since Obamacare went into effect the vast majority of jobs created have been part time and temporary jobs so the employer wouldn't get hit with the costs of Obamacare. The other problem is the QE that the Fed started under Obama. They have been printing over $80 billion/month and sending it straight to the stock market. One of the laws of economics is that the more currency there is floating around the higher prices will go--inflation. In other words, the Obama administration and Fed have been stealing from us through inflation at a fantastic rate as every time the dollar is devalued what its purchasing power drops. And who gets stuck with that? All of us.
Oh, the government tells us inflation is low, but who really believes that? My food costs have risen from less than $300/month to more than $500/month in less than 3 years and my food buying habits haven't changed at all.. Much of this is hidden price increases. Take cottage cheese for instance. It used to be sold by the quart--32 ounces. Now it is in a 24 ounce container. That alone is a 25% increase in cost. It doesn't even take account of how much the price/container has risen. Many other products have had the same thing happen. I used to buy grapfruit juice for $3.25/half gallon. Now its a few pennies higher, but the carton has been reduced in size 9%. Noticed the reduction in size of potato chip bags? Candy bar sizes and prices? The rise in meat prices? However, when the government figures food price inflation they count only the cost of the container. They ignore the size of the container. Easy way to lie about inflation.
A week or two ago Trump rolled back a bunch of regulations Obama had put in place just before he left office. The Democrats screamed about it, but those regulations alone would have drained about $2 trillion/yr out of the economy. He also rolled back the permitting process for things like road and bridge building/reconstruction. He had a report that a road contractor had given him that had cost the contractor 5 years and $24 million to make. The cost of the report was in the neighborhood of $7000/page. And the contractor still couldn't build his 18 miles of road under our current regulatory structure.
The MSM didn't cover these things at all that I know of. Why? Because these are things that Trump is doing that will start the economy to move again. If they did cover it they did it in a way to ignore how this will affect job creation in a positive way.
I don't know if you have ever seen the shadowstats.com website. The guy who is the brains behind it looks at the US economy the way the government used to look at it 30 to 40 years ago. He figures inflation, unemployment, the value of the dollar, the gdp, etc... the same way the federal government used to before they began manipulating the numbers. You ought to take a look at the site. It's a real education. We are at, financially speaking, the same point we were in the 1930's economically, only we have been in a negative growth period, depression in other words, since 2001. He has publicly available charts on our economy on the site that anyone can look at for free..
I'm married. My wife lost her job a few years back due to the badly slumping economy and hasn't been able to find a job that pays anything close to what she used to make. She makes less than 50% of her former salary.
Under Obamacare my premiums have gone through the roof. Two years ago, if I would have been able to afford it, my premiums would have been $257/month with a $3500 deductible. That is basically $6600/yr. On top of that my medications would have cost me another $500/month over and above the copays and what the insurance would cover. That is $12,600/yr on less than $25,000/yr income. I'm disabled if you want to know the reason for the low income.
This year, if I had actually puchased a plan my monthly payment would have been $450/month, with a $6000/yr deductible. Add to that the costs of my medications over and above the copays and insurance coverage of $600/month and it comes to a right tidy percentage of our yearly income. Our yearly costs would have been a minimum of $18,600. That doesn't cost any possible hospitalization costs or what I have to pay for specialists visits which have a copay of $100/visit. I'm supposed to buy that on a total income of less than $30000/yr. In fact, the government will fine me for not having spent 62% of our total income on health insurance premiums, deductibles, and copays.
Let's look at single payer insurance. California has 39 million residents. They figured single payer costs of $400 billion/yr. That is twice California's current total yearly revenue.
Let's just say Caliifornia has 40 milllion residents to make a nice round number. And let's figure that the US has 320 million citizens. One is over estimated slightly and the other under estimated slightly. That makes the California population 1/8 of the US population. That means that a conservative estimate of single payer insurance costs for the entire us to $3.2 trillion dollars. That's approximately 75% of current total federal government spending.
Since the federal government already borrows $4 out of ever $10 it spends just where do you see the money to pay for a single payer system coming from? And just how sustainable are the federal government's current spending habits, let alone with a 75% increase in federal spending?
Also, do you understand that the current published federal debt of around $20 trillion is peanuts compared to what it owes in unfunded liabilities such as pension plans, future payments for current entitlement programs, etc...? In 2010 our unfunded liabilities were around $120-$140 trillion. Meaning if the feds had cut spending enough to begin paying that down at $1 trillion/yr it would have taken us well over a century to pay our debts? Our current unfunded liabilities have been estimated in the $200 trillion range. In other words paying them off with a federal budget that is $1 trillion in the black ever year would take us two centuries to pay the debt.
The US is flat out bankrupt.
I have often wondered at people who claim to do 4 or 5 things at once. How do they ever get anything done, especially if they are doing complex tasks?
It has been my experience over my lifetime that any time I am interrupted doing a complex task that when I go back to it my first thoughts are, Ok, where was I? What was I doing? To get back to where I was before being interrupted takes time, and the more interruptions there are the worse the problem gets. If you have tools you're working with it gets worse as you have to locate the tool you had in hand, and often it has been laid down while my brain is occupied with the interruption so that I have no recollection where I laid it down.
If I'm interrupted writing out a complex thought the problem is even more wasteful of time for then I have to completely rebuild my thought process. The longer a person can concentrate on a single task the more they can accomplish as they become far more efficient the deeper their concentration levels become.
I'm married to a woman who has a very hard time doing one job at a time. She stops doing one task to do another at least a half dozen times before she finishes the original task she started. As a result it takes her forever to do anything. A job that should take her 15 minutes will often not be completed for a couple of hours, and then she has a bunch of other partially completed tasks on her hands. And she wonders why it takes her so long to get anything done.
It wasn't the speech of private citizens that led to WWII. That is a non-starter. It was the German government's actions that led to WWII.
Britain has basically done the same thing.
http://www.theargus.co.uk/news...