This is a list of the amount of paid days you are required to give your employees:...
USA 0
This is a good thing. It promotes maximum freedom by giving the employee the choice to determine what is more important to them, vacation time or money. You can take a nice low paying government job with lots of vacation or you can take a stress-inducing job with no time-off but gobs of wealth. The only effect of forcing companies to give vacation time would be to slash wages across the board.
However, one point you seem to have missed is that the 250k threshold is "taxable income"
Good point. But it still seems unnecessarily low for a family. It also doesn't make sense. Why put the individual cutoff at 200k and the family at 250k? It seems to me that an individual (likely with no children to care for, no life insurance policy, no daycare/school bills, etc) would have far more reason to have a lower cutoff than a family. Yet the family is slotted at 250k instead of the seemingly more appropriate 400k doubling?
I really don't see an additional 4% tax on taxable income over 250k as that unbearable a burden
Nor do I. But in the economic state we're in, I think it's downright insane to take any action that even has the most marginal chance of having small business nudge the brakes. The recovery is simply too fragile atm to risk jobs. The wage freeze is also a horrendously bad idea. Frozen wages + substantial cost hikes/inflation are a _horrible_ combination
Providing preventative care with the hope of reducing E/R care is the correct strategy
I don't think anyone disagrees with you there. What I think you're missing is that it's the other 2,999 pages of the bill that people have an issue with. For instance, forcing insurance companies to accept all pre-existing conditions and never drop anybody -- how in the world can a company manage risk in this manner? What's to stop someone from not paying a dime in premiums and then just jumping on an insurance plan whenever they need it? I believe this singular factor (introduction of substantial risk and cost to the "pool" of insurees w/o a concurrent rise in inlays) will cause healthcare costs to skyrocket way farther than any savings in "preventative vs emergency care".
And that's just a piece of the equation. If I really wanted to get into it (which I don't particularly want to), I'd detail how the main factors that cause huge spikes in healthcare costs aren't even being addressed: the _existence_ of insurance companies as middle men in all healthcare transactions, lack of transparency, lack of consumer options (due to employment ties + no competitive alternatives), Medicare/Medicaid (and its effective on premiums), etc, etc.
It's not that the opponents of this bill (and of single-payer) don't want healthcare reform, we just want it done right. Though we're in agreeance on preventative care.
First of all, get a grip! No one is attacking anyone.
Oh come now, you say you're not attacking anyone or pigeonholing anyone, yet you clearly took a smug, sarcastic potshot ("I'm sorry if the additional tax burden will prevent joe moneybags from purchasing that new Ferrari and will have to settle for a Corvette"). And you're surprised that you get an emotionally charged response? I'm cool with coming to the debate table with a rational head, but you certainly didn't come across as cool and levelheaded.
For what it's worth, I apologize for snapping, but I absolutely can't stand this assumption that the 250k two-income household somehow has more in common with Bill Gates than Joe Average -- and it comes up again and again. I'd sooner jack the taxes of a family making 500k a year by 10% than I would raise by 3% the taxes of a family making 250k a year. Lifestyles matter...the 250k family is working a 9-to-5 job, paying bills, raising a family, etc. The 500k family is vacationing in Aruba 4 times a year, having staff clean their mansions and cook for them, having limo drivers drive them around, taking helicopters to their private yachts, etc, etc.
My other statements were completely accurate as well. The CBO is shitty at estimating anything, and no one is being turned away at hospitals.
Second, since when is access to healtcare considered a part of one's wealth
No one can be denied "access to healthcare" in this country -- emergency care is required by law. Therefore the _only_ question we're talking about is cost (aka "wealth")
Obviously, a much larger percentage of average joe's income goes toward basic living necessities than does joe moneybags. I'm sorry if the additional tax burden will prevent joe moneybags from purchasing that new Ferrari and will have to settle for a Corvette, but if that prevents average joe's child from dying from a perfectly preventable illness then I say it's completely fair.
I find it absolutely sickening that you and your buddies find it perfectly acceptable to lump the upper-middle class/affluent Americans in with the helicopter-riding CEOs of the world. Families making 250k a year still bust their ass from day-to-day and still worry about bills and they have far larger concerns than which ridiculously expensive car to buy. Am I crying a river for them? No. Do they deserve to be attacked financially with the same fervor that BP's board of directors is? Hell no. The truly rich megamillionaires have the ability to shelter/shuffle their money in such ways to take advantage of loopholes and effectively pay zero taxes. The affluent have no such freedoms and are taking the full brunt of each of those tax hikes.
By contrast, Obama and the Democrats worked against those advocating single-payer:
Just because he couldn't pass his extreme left agenda doesn't mean he doesn't believe in it. Obama was for single payer (http://www.alternet.org/health/139959). He just couldn't get the votes from the Dems in Congress. So he changed his stance so that it wouldn't look like he was caving. It's silly to classify Obama by what bills get passed -- major compromises were made to pander to Republicans and Blue Dog democrats, both of whom are far more "to the right" than Obama.
Hell, even now he's gungho on drawing a hard line on the Bush tax cuts @ 250k instead of compromising at like 500k or a million. There's quite a few Dems who think they should pass a bill with a higher cutoff, but Obama will have nothing of it.
Sorry but you are way off. Just look at the candidates of the Tea Party. It is not just a minority in the Tea Party that is nuts. They let people like Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell represent the party.
I challenge you to name two other tea party candidates without looking them up on the internet. I bet you can't. I bet you also have no idea what those candidates stand for or what kind of people they are. As the OP said, you're just parrotting what the hype machine (be it other buddies with similar views, the media, or left-leaning blogs) focuses on. Two morons do not comprise an entire movement, no matter how much they're spotlighted and focused on.
It is not welfare, it's a forced savings plan that was implemented by the government.
If that's the case, it's a shitty plan that was horribly conceived. 40 years of the government forcing me to cram some money under my mattress is a ludicrously pisspoor way to prepare for retirement. Longterm (_not_ short term) market investing is a proven sound retirement option. Lifecycle funds that invest in indexes and gradually shift money to safer investments like bonds as you get older would be a reasonable "forced retirement plan". As implemented, it's complete garbage and should be repealed.
So then, there must be rampant inflation then correct? According to economic indicators our currency has been strengthening recently, and inflation has been low to non-existent.
"Economic indicators" are bullshit, fudged numbers put out by the government to say whatever they want them to say. Have you seen the cost of oil? Cotton? Grain? Fertilizer? Metals? Prices are going up practically across the board and you're going to tell me there's no inflation? You really need to get off the gov't Kool Aid.
Yeah, who will be taking their SS money and dumping it back into the economy.
Why would they do that? This is a generation that has had their finances practically decimated by the stock market plunge. My parents are on the verge of retirement and the only thought on their mind is living a life of thrift, not of "spend, spend, spend!".
Mainly because we don't have a real education system in place for people to gain new skill sets.
So why is no real effort ever made to advance education? Why do politicians prefer no-strings-attached handouts over rewards for perhaps achieving or at least trying to better your situation? I'd be _much_ less averse to free government money for people who want a degree vs. free government money for subsidized food/housing/care for "the poor". We spend over a trillion a year indiscriminately giving money to the elderly (Social Security/Medicare) whether they need it or not and the poor (Medicaid, Food Stamps, Section 8, etc, etc) whether or not they're trying to better their situation. Where's the incentives?
The problem with most Indieware is that it's just too unpolished. Whether it be from terrible graphics, a terrible interface, or something entirely different, it simply lacks. And that's the problem. There's no middle ground in gaming between the cookie cutter copies with spectacular production values and the indie games with spectacular gaming value. The games that are the best of both worlds truly are few and far between.
All well and good, but what makes you think you're a libertarian, then?
Because I meet the criteria?
By definition, a libertarian is "One who advocates maximizing individual rights and minimizing the role of the state".
In essence, a libertarian is at the absolute core a small government advocate. And obviously, what constitutes "small" varies a bit from person to person. Whereas I might be okay with a small, affordable state-level social safety net, another libertarian might not. It's no different than any other differences between members of a party -- not all Republicans are pro-life, not all Democrats are pro-choice. For some Republicans, the most important issue is religion and "traditional beliefs" (perhaps a kind way of saying gay-hating). For others, it's a strong military. For others yet, it's fiscal responsibility. For others, it's all of the above. For one Republican, they might favor a strong military but not necessarily runaway spending on the military. For another Republican, the sky is the limit on military spending.
My ultimate point is that you can't sum up all the members of a party solely on philosophy by the extreme subset of that party's beliefs. People fall all over the spectrum, even within each party.
I'm sorry, but that's BS. Libertarianism is about minarchy on all levels of the government, not about decentralization.
I fail to see where this supposition stems from. It seems to me as if Decentralization (dispersing decision-making governance closer to the people and/or citizen) and Libertarianism (philosophy maximizing individual freedom) go hand-in-hand. Whereas among individual Libertarians, the "desired liberty scale" could range anywhere from "total anarchy" to "all state government" to "some federal government", I certainly believe that the concept of Libertarianism necessitates a need to push any kind of liberty infringing behavior as close to the people as possible (aka decentralization).
I am a libertarian and a constitutionalist and I support state welfare programs. Heck, I actually support a great many things at the state level. And I'd even be receptive to passing an amendment to allow government to provide a federal welfare safety net. But the key word there is "amendment" -- I believe our laws exist for a reason and shouldn't be simply glossed over merely because a mere fraction more of the populace happens to prefer one course of action than another. Filibustering, although widely disliked, is a _good_ thing. The passage of federal law should require far more than the agreement of a simple majority.
They don't want "limited" government, they want "effective" government, which would necessarily be as small as practical.
I think you're confusing Libertarians with Liberals. The typical Liberal stance is that the government is required to step in because the _world_/"free market" is an imperfect place. Based on such a viewpoint, an assumption has to be made that whatever the government does to intervene will be more effective than not intervening. Since most Libertarians believe government intervention often causes more problems than it solves, they typically opt for severely limiting government to only those cases that there is overwhelming bipartisan support for. Whereas Libertarians recognize that the government can be just as corrupt and ineffective as the corporate world, advocates of larger government tend to have tunnel-vision with respect to only demonizing the actions of Corporate America. Libertarians do want regulations -- they merely want it in limited and specific places like food safety checks, where 80+% of the country is in lockstep -- and they don't want it in grand and nebulous places like the bloated medical bill, which barely passed with like 51% of the vote.
All of your points are valid. I would like to remind you, though, that if Steam hadn't become a service available to the consumer, we'd have some pretty horrendous DRM schemes going on with disk releases
Umm, isn't "horrendous DRM schemes" built into Steam? Games you can't install/play without internet connectivity...games that terminate your game session when the internet goes down...saved games stored on the remote server rather than locally...required online accounts...not to mention the laundry list of stuff the OP already mentioned). It seems to me that DRM is just as insidious, if not worse, than it was back in the days of SecuROM.
Also it makes sense, because private health care is exactly like legalised mugging (wanna live? pay up) so the alternative _has_ to be better, even for very large degrees of corruption and inefficiency
Don't you see that you've set up a major hasty generalization case here? You have nothing but correlation with no causation, and you're trying to use it as proof. On top of that, you're insisting on a "fallacy of the single cause" in that a single factor is somehow the only determining factor in a large, complex system.
Personally, I think a large part of the problem is insurance companies paying for every little thing, whether life saving or not, instead of this cost being reflected to the consumer. As a US health care consumer, I have very little say over who provides my health care (since it's tied to employment), I almost never see the true costs of what things cost, and I can never get a price quote _prior_ to receiving care. How does this create a competitive market that I can shop around in and force price negotiation? It doesn't -- in that sense, this market is _not_ private/free. So I believe if you socialize health care and leave the insurance companies in the picture, costs will continue to rise.
On top of that, American doctors tend to do _everything_ possible to keep a person alive, even if that means spending millions of dollars to gain a few extra days or weeks (this is not nearly as common in the systems you tout as perfect). While this is all well and good from a moral standpoint, it jacks costs _way_ up -- and since no one ever has to confront the bills personally (due to the aforementioned obscuring of bills), no one is ever going to turn it down.
How do you know Medicare isn't the cause? Half a trillion in subsidized medicine could very easily force costs to go up elsewhere in the system, which turns into higher bills for the rest of us.
Any of these aforementioned factors could be the driving factor behind high costs. Who knows? How can you take such an authoritative stance based on little more than correlation? For instance, we have a higher GDP than any country in the world -- does that automatically mean our economic system is the best system possible and that everyone should adopt all aspects of it? Because if the other countries had signed onto the "derivatives" concept, I'm pretty sure they'd be in worse shape than we are now. As another example, dictatorships tend to have the lowest crime rates of all countries -- does that mean dictatorships are the ideal solution to crime prevention?
In sum, you can't just make blanket statements about entire systems based on suppositions. You need facts.
so the alternative _has_ to be better,
False dilemma -- there are more than two solutions to reforming health care. Creating an actual market where the consumer can assess cost and either removing insurance companies entirely (or reducing their application to things like major operations and emergencies) would be a good example. This is how auto insurance works, and those rates certainly aren't through the roof -- I pay for my oil changes and maintenance myself and in the unforeseen event of a major catastrophe, the insurance company steps in.
Another possible solution would be promoting and/or funding preventative care to reduce costs farther down the road.
We didn't have this kind of health care disaster when I was a kid and the government _didn't_ have their hands all over it -- and back then a person could actually switch employment without the need to think about losing health insurance. And you want _more_ government? Every government solution I've seen yet has failed miserably and in many cases made things worse -- many time they slap another medical law out there and prices shoot up even faster.
The fact is that the US health system costs 10 points of GDP more than socialised systems with better outcomes. So as far as efficiency goes, experience shows public health care is massively more efficient than private one.
Fact: France and the UK spend half what the US spends on health, they get better outcome. Their systems might be inefficient, but compared to the US version, they are crazy good...
Man, that's one hell of a leap of logic.
What if other governments are simply more efficient than our government?
What about the fact that healthcare isn't really a free "private" market in the US since it is heavily regulated?
What about private implementations that actual allow for competition instead of "insurance company negotiated rates"?
What about differences in citizen lifestyle or country size?
What about any number of extraneous factors and countless variable that matter a whole hell of alot when judging a massive system?
This strange belief that you can make an apples-to-pink-elephants comparison of the US medical situation and another country's medical situation is one gigantic failing in basic logic. That's like saying "well, the Autobahn has no speed limits and the accident rate over there is clearly rather low, so naturally we should just be able to remove speed limits on all our roads here for an automatic win".
There is a third option. I refer to it as the "single payer public option" just to get up the ire of the Tea Party folks.
Why do you think the Tea Party would object to government control over infrastructure?
The Interstate Commerce Clause is a specifically enumerated power of Constitution granting the federal government the ability to regulate interstate commerce.
There is no such clause granting the federal government the power to regulate healthcare, which is specifically why they object.
I mean, you don't see them complaining about interstate roads, do you?
No, because it's a hodge-podge of a bunch of ideas that a very slim majority agree with is why it's bad. There are plenty of simple stand-alone ideas in there that would easily get 80-90% support. But they're muxed in with a bunch of stuff that is far more controversial. That's why it's bad -- they forced through a bunch of stuff that most people don't like when they could have simply trimmed it down to the smaller subset of things they had a large consensus on. I mean, seriously -- when your own party is at odds with you, the bill is clearly not "sensible and bipartisan"
Yes, jobs and economies are important, but Americans also know that when Obama took office the jobs we were losing were around 800k a month.
When Obama took office, the Dems held a substantial congressional advantage. In the last 2 years of his presidency, Bush was lame-duck at best and Democratic agenda compromiser at worst.
1) When looking at individual parts of HCR, most people approved of them.
Then why didn't the politicians pass a 50-page bill of the stuff everyone agreed on rather than a 4000-page bill of a whole mixture of crap?
The answer to that question is "partisanship".
True "compromise" would have been a smaller bill composed only of the things everyone was on the same page about.
Fake "compromise" is leaving all your partisan ideas in and snipping/adding bits here and there to make it more palatable to other politicians.
What the Dems did accomplish was to prevent a panic
Actually, in many ways the acts of the government generate a panic. Just look at how the stock market reacted to pretty much anything the Fed has done in the past 2 years. Hell, just look at the effect QE2 is having on commodities prices. If Greenspan even opens his mouth and expresses anything but bubbly praise, the entire country shits a brick expecting a "double-dip" recession.
According to many polls, the number one concern this election was the economy. Somehow in the minds of many, the economy is the fault of the Democrats, in spite of the fact that the 2008 candidates left the campaign trail to focus on the rapidly failing economy.
What kind of revisionist history are you looking at? Practically none of the political candidates except Ron Paul was talking about the economy during the 2008 elections -- and everyone was rolling their eyes at him. Everyone else was discussing the War in Afghanistan, or healthcare, or Guantanamo (those are all Obama) or any number of other unrelated issues.
And then after taking office, far more time was spent getting his political agenda (healthcare, minimum wage laws, etc) passed than was spent on attempting to spur the economy.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a good thing. It promotes maximum freedom by giving the employee the choice to determine what is more important to them, vacation time or money. You can take a nice low paying government job with lots of vacation or you can take a stress-inducing job with no time-off but gobs of wealth. The only effect of forcing companies to give vacation time would be to slash wages across the board.
Good point. But it still seems unnecessarily low for a family. It also doesn't make sense. Why put the individual cutoff at 200k and the family at 250k? It seems to me that an individual (likely with no children to care for, no life insurance policy, no daycare/school bills, etc) would have far more reason to have a lower cutoff than a family. Yet the family is slotted at 250k instead of the seemingly more appropriate 400k doubling?
Nor do I. But in the economic state we're in, I think it's downright insane to take any action that even has the most marginal chance of having small business nudge the brakes. The recovery is simply too fragile atm to risk jobs. The wage freeze is also a horrendously bad idea. Frozen wages + substantial cost hikes/inflation are a _horrible_ combination
I don't think anyone disagrees with you there. What I think you're missing is that it's the other 2,999 pages of the bill that people have an issue with. For instance, forcing insurance companies to accept all pre-existing conditions and never drop anybody -- how in the world can a company manage risk in this manner? What's to stop someone from not paying a dime in premiums and then just jumping on an insurance plan whenever they need it? I believe this singular factor (introduction of substantial risk and cost to the "pool" of insurees w/o a concurrent rise in inlays) will cause healthcare costs to skyrocket way farther than any savings in "preventative vs emergency care".
And that's just a piece of the equation. If I really wanted to get into it (which I don't particularly want to), I'd detail how the main factors that cause huge spikes in healthcare costs aren't even being addressed: the _existence_ of insurance companies as middle men in all healthcare transactions, lack of transparency, lack of consumer options (due to employment ties + no competitive alternatives), Medicare/Medicaid (and its effective on premiums), etc, etc.
It's not that the opponents of this bill (and of single-payer) don't want healthcare reform, we just want it done right. Though we're in agreeance on preventative care.
Oh come now, you say you're not attacking anyone or pigeonholing anyone, yet you clearly took a smug, sarcastic potshot ("I'm sorry if the additional tax burden will prevent joe moneybags from purchasing that new Ferrari and will have to settle for a Corvette"). And you're surprised that you get an emotionally charged response? I'm cool with coming to the debate table with a rational head, but you certainly didn't come across as cool and levelheaded.
For what it's worth, I apologize for snapping, but I absolutely can't stand this assumption that the 250k two-income household somehow has more in common with Bill Gates than Joe Average -- and it comes up again and again. I'd sooner jack the taxes of a family making 500k a year by 10% than I would raise by 3% the taxes of a family making 250k a year. Lifestyles matter...the 250k family is working a 9-to-5 job, paying bills, raising a family, etc. The 500k family is vacationing in Aruba 4 times a year, having staff clean their mansions and cook for them, having limo drivers drive them around, taking helicopters to their private yachts, etc, etc.
My other statements were completely accurate as well. The CBO is shitty at estimating anything, and no one is being turned away at hospitals.
Phew, I'm glad the OMB is around to tell me how it is. For a second there, I thought the Iraq War cost more than 50 to 60 billion.
http://articles.cnn.com/2003-01-01/politics/sproject.irq.war.cost_1_war-with-iraq-cost-cost-estimate-saddam-hussein?_s=PM:ALLPOLITICS
No one can be denied "access to healthcare" in this country -- emergency care is required by law. Therefore the _only_ question we're talking about is cost (aka "wealth")
I find it absolutely sickening that you and your buddies find it perfectly acceptable to lump the upper-middle class/affluent Americans in with the helicopter-riding CEOs of the world. Families making 250k a year still bust their ass from day-to-day and still worry about bills and they have far larger concerns than which ridiculously expensive car to buy. Am I crying a river for them? No. Do they deserve to be attacked financially with the same fervor that BP's board of directors is? Hell no. The truly rich megamillionaires have the ability to shelter/shuffle their money in such ways to take advantage of loopholes and effectively pay zero taxes. The affluent have no such freedoms and are taking the full brunt of each of those tax hikes.
Ken Buck damn near won too. He lost by literally hundreds of votes. Shame too. He was one of the better ones.
Just because he couldn't pass his extreme left agenda doesn't mean he doesn't believe in it. Obama was for single payer (http://www.alternet.org/health/139959). He just couldn't get the votes from the Dems in Congress. So he changed his stance so that it wouldn't look like he was caving. It's silly to classify Obama by what bills get passed -- major compromises were made to pander to Republicans and Blue Dog democrats, both of whom are far more "to the right" than Obama.
Hell, even now he's gungho on drawing a hard line on the Bush tax cuts @ 250k instead of compromising at like 500k or a million. There's quite a few Dems who think they should pass a bill with a higher cutoff, but Obama will have nothing of it.
I challenge you to name two other tea party candidates without looking them up on the internet. I bet you can't. I bet you also have no idea what those candidates stand for or what kind of people they are. As the OP said, you're just parrotting what the hype machine (be it other buddies with similar views, the media, or left-leaning blogs) focuses on. Two morons do not comprise an entire movement, no matter how much they're spotlighted and focused on.
If that's the case, it's a shitty plan that was horribly conceived. 40 years of the government forcing me to cram some money under my mattress is a ludicrously pisspoor way to prepare for retirement. Longterm (_not_ short term) market investing is a proven sound retirement option. Lifecycle funds that invest in indexes and gradually shift money to safer investments like bonds as you get older would be a reasonable "forced retirement plan". As implemented, it's complete garbage and should be repealed.
"Economic indicators" are bullshit, fudged numbers put out by the government to say whatever they want them to say. Have you seen the cost of oil? Cotton? Grain? Fertilizer? Metals? Prices are going up practically across the board and you're going to tell me there's no inflation? You really need to get off the gov't Kool Aid.
Why would they do that? This is a generation that has had their finances practically decimated by the stock market plunge. My parents are on the verge of retirement and the only thought on their mind is living a life of thrift, not of "spend, spend, spend!".
So why is no real effort ever made to advance education? Why do politicians prefer no-strings-attached handouts over rewards for perhaps achieving or at least trying to better your situation? I'd be _much_ less averse to free government money for people who want a degree vs. free government money for subsidized food/housing/care for "the poor". We spend over a trillion a year indiscriminately giving money to the elderly (Social Security/Medicare) whether they need it or not and the poor (Medicaid, Food Stamps, Section 8, etc, etc) whether or not they're trying to better their situation . Where's the incentives?
Wow, I'm surprised you can give the Deus Ex authors any anticipatory credit after that wretched turd that was Deus Ex 2. I also loved the original.
The problem with most Indieware is that it's just too unpolished. Whether it be from terrible graphics, a terrible interface, or something entirely different, it simply lacks. And that's the problem. There's no middle ground in gaming between the cookie cutter copies with spectacular production values and the indie games with spectacular gaming value. The games that are the best of both worlds truly are few and far between.
Because I meet the criteria?
By definition, a libertarian is "One who advocates maximizing individual rights and minimizing the role of the state". In essence, a libertarian is at the absolute core a small government advocate. And obviously, what constitutes "small" varies a bit from person to person. Whereas I might be okay with a small, affordable state-level social safety net, another libertarian might not. It's no different than any other differences between members of a party -- not all Republicans are pro-life, not all Democrats are pro-choice. For some Republicans, the most important issue is religion and "traditional beliefs" (perhaps a kind way of saying gay-hating). For others, it's a strong military. For others yet, it's fiscal responsibility. For others, it's all of the above. For one Republican, they might favor a strong military but not necessarily runaway spending on the military. For another Republican, the sky is the limit on military spending.
My ultimate point is that you can't sum up all the members of a party solely on philosophy by the extreme subset of that party's beliefs. People fall all over the spectrum, even within each party.
I fail to see where this supposition stems from. It seems to me as if Decentralization (dispersing decision-making governance closer to the people and/or citizen) and Libertarianism (philosophy maximizing individual freedom) go hand-in-hand. Whereas among individual Libertarians, the "desired liberty scale" could range anywhere from "total anarchy" to "all state government" to "some federal government", I certainly believe that the concept of Libertarianism necessitates a need to push any kind of liberty infringing behavior as close to the people as possible (aka decentralization).
I am a libertarian and a constitutionalist and I support state welfare programs. Heck, I actually support a great many things at the state level. And I'd even be receptive to passing an amendment to allow government to provide a federal welfare safety net. But the key word there is "amendment" -- I believe our laws exist for a reason and shouldn't be simply glossed over merely because a mere fraction more of the populace happens to prefer one course of action than another. Filibustering, although widely disliked, is a _good_ thing. The passage of federal law should require far more than the agreement of a simple majority.
I think you're confusing Libertarians with Liberals. The typical Liberal stance is that the government is required to step in because the _world_/"free market" is an imperfect place. Based on such a viewpoint, an assumption has to be made that whatever the government does to intervene will be more effective than not intervening. Since most Libertarians believe government intervention often causes more problems than it solves, they typically opt for severely limiting government to only those cases that there is overwhelming bipartisan support for. Whereas Libertarians recognize that the government can be just as corrupt and ineffective as the corporate world, advocates of larger government tend to have tunnel-vision with respect to only demonizing the actions of Corporate America. Libertarians do want regulations -- they merely want it in limited and specific places like food safety checks, where 80+% of the country is in lockstep -- and they don't want it in grand and nebulous places like the bloated medical bill, which barely passed with like 51% of the vote.
720p is possible now on the Dreamcast with the VGA adapter cable.
Umm, isn't "horrendous DRM schemes" built into Steam? Games you can't install/play without internet connectivity...games that terminate your game session when the internet goes down...saved games stored on the remote server rather than locally...required online accounts...not to mention the laundry list of stuff the OP already mentioned). It seems to me that DRM is just as insidious, if not worse, than it was back in the days of SecuROM.
Don't you see that you've set up a major hasty generalization case here? You have nothing but correlation with no causation, and you're trying to use it as proof. On top of that, you're insisting on a "fallacy of the single cause" in that a single factor is somehow the only determining factor in a large, complex system.
Personally, I think a large part of the problem is insurance companies paying for every little thing, whether life saving or not, instead of this cost being reflected to the consumer. As a US health care consumer, I have very little say over who provides my health care (since it's tied to employment), I almost never see the true costs of what things cost, and I can never get a price quote _prior_ to receiving care. How does this create a competitive market that I can shop around in and force price negotiation? It doesn't -- in that sense, this market is _not_ private/free. So I believe if you socialize health care and leave the insurance companies in the picture, costs will continue to rise.
On top of that, American doctors tend to do _everything_ possible to keep a person alive, even if that means spending millions of dollars to gain a few extra days or weeks (this is not nearly as common in the systems you tout as perfect). While this is all well and good from a moral standpoint, it jacks costs _way_ up -- and since no one ever has to confront the bills personally (due to the aforementioned obscuring of bills), no one is ever going to turn it down.
How do you know Medicare isn't the cause? Half a trillion in subsidized medicine could very easily force costs to go up elsewhere in the system, which turns into higher bills for the rest of us.
Any of these aforementioned factors could be the driving factor behind high costs. Who knows? How can you take such an authoritative stance based on little more than correlation? For instance, we have a higher GDP than any country in the world -- does that automatically mean our economic system is the best system possible and that everyone should adopt all aspects of it? Because if the other countries had signed onto the "derivatives" concept, I'm pretty sure they'd be in worse shape than we are now. As another example, dictatorships tend to have the lowest crime rates of all countries -- does that mean dictatorships are the ideal solution to crime prevention?
In sum, you can't just make blanket statements about entire systems based on suppositions. You need facts.
False dilemma -- there are more than two solutions to reforming health care. Creating an actual market where the consumer can assess cost and either removing insurance companies entirely (or reducing their application to things like major operations and emergencies) would be a good example. This is how auto insurance works, and those rates certainly aren't through the roof -- I pay for my oil changes and maintenance myself and in the unforeseen event of a major catastrophe, the insurance company steps in.
Another possible solution would be promoting and/or funding preventative care to reduce costs farther down the road.
We didn't have this kind of health care disaster when I was a kid and the government _didn't_ have their hands all over it -- and back then a person could actually switch employment without the need to think about losing health insurance. And you want _more_ government? Every government solution I've seen yet has failed miserably and in many cases made things worse -- many time they slap another medical law out there and prices shoot up even faster.
Man, that's one hell of a leap of logic.
What if other governments are simply more efficient than our government?
What about the fact that healthcare isn't really a free "private" market in the US since it is heavily regulated?
What about private implementations that actual allow for competition instead of "insurance company negotiated rates"?
What about differences in citizen lifestyle or country size?
What about any number of extraneous factors and countless variable that matter a whole hell of alot when judging a massive system?
This strange belief that you can make an apples-to-pink-elephants comparison of the US medical situation and another country's medical situation is one gigantic failing in basic logic. That's like saying "well, the Autobahn has no speed limits and the accident rate over there is clearly rather low, so naturally we should just be able to remove speed limits on all our roads here for an automatic win".
Why do you think the Tea Party would object to government control over infrastructure?
The Interstate Commerce Clause is a specifically enumerated power of Constitution granting the federal government the ability to regulate interstate commerce.
There is no such clause granting the federal government the power to regulate healthcare, which is specifically why they object.
I mean, you don't see them complaining about interstate roads, do you?
No, because it's a hodge-podge of a bunch of ideas that a very slim majority agree with is why it's bad. There are plenty of simple stand-alone ideas in there that would easily get 80-90% support. But they're muxed in with a bunch of stuff that is far more controversial. That's why it's bad -- they forced through a bunch of stuff that most people don't like when they could have simply trimmed it down to the smaller subset of things they had a large consensus on. I mean, seriously -- when your own party is at odds with you, the bill is clearly not "sensible and bipartisan"
When Obama took office, the Dems held a substantial congressional advantage. In the last 2 years of his presidency, Bush was lame-duck at best and Democratic agenda compromiser at worst.
Only TARP has been repaid -- and if they had done it right, they would have made a far larger profit than they did.
Obama's Stimulus on the other hand is money lost. Permanently.
Then why didn't the politicians pass a 50-page bill of the stuff everyone agreed on rather than a 4000-page bill of a whole mixture of crap?
The answer to that question is "partisanship". True "compromise" would have been a smaller bill composed only of the things everyone was on the same page about. Fake "compromise" is leaving all your partisan ideas in and snipping/adding bits here and there to make it more palatable to other politicians.
Actually, in many ways the acts of the government generate a panic. Just look at how the stock market reacted to pretty much anything the Fed has done in the past 2 years. Hell, just look at the effect QE2 is having on commodities prices. If Greenspan even opens his mouth and expresses anything but bubbly praise, the entire country shits a brick expecting a "double-dip" recession.
What kind of revisionist history are you looking at? Practically none of the political candidates except Ron Paul was talking about the economy during the 2008 elections -- and everyone was rolling their eyes at him. Everyone else was discussing the War in Afghanistan, or healthcare, or Guantanamo (those are all Obama) or any number of other unrelated issues.
And then after taking office, far more time was spent getting his political agenda (healthcare, minimum wage laws, etc) passed than was spent on attempting to spur the economy.