I think there's also a wider issue here, which is the right of governments to act with impunity when dealing with internal dissent. Both Russia and China are going to be facing similar protests in the foreseeable future. China's leadership is skating by on many issues because of the economic growth and prosperity being generated right now, however, when the Chinese economy finally hits the wall they're probably planning similar actions. Russia already has similar problems. They'd like to see Assad win because it would discourage their own dissidents.
The U.N. exists to prevent the U.S., China, England, France and Russia from going to war with each other. That is its primary purpose, that's why each of those nations have permanent security council seats and vetos. China and Russia and have been using their vetos to allow the Syrian bloodshed to play out. The implicit threat is that they would consider going to war over the issue if the rest of the world intervenes.
Actually, carbon taxes (and other solutions) can actually produce efficiency benefits without significantly impacting competitiveness. In the U. S. the Republican "base" doesn't support action on climate change because "it's not their problem". Think about it, the Republican demographics are sliding towards the elderly (age 60+). They've got a triple whammy of 1) not wanting anything done about climate change because they'll be dead before the "real effects show up", 2) they're retired and therefore on fixed incomes (so they are completely opposed to any tax increases and the easiest way to increase their spending money is to reduce taxes or shift the taxes to the young), and 3) they don't like today's "young people" so why should they sacrifice to help out those "lazy bums who can't find a job"?
Not being sick? Do you honestly believe that most people stop and ask themselves "what impact will eating this donut have on my insurance bills?"
Preventable poor health is the end result of many small decisions poorly made. I sincerely doubt insurance costs have much, if any, impact on those decisions. The costs are abstract, in the future, and dissociated from the behavior that would trigger them. After all, if the incentives actually worked the way you think they should, the U.S. should not have the highest rate of obesity in the developed world.
Furthermore as a counter-example to your hypothesis, you should note the difference between the U.S. and Canada. Canada has single-payer public health care, and has a reasonably similar culture and environment to the United States, however, Canada's Obesity rate is less than half the U.S. rate. By your reasoning those results should be reversed.
Thus since a single payer system reduces costs through economies of scale and bargaining power and does not seem to encourage unhealthy behavior, it seems like a very good solution.
If you want to motivate people to change their behavior you'd better make the costs more directly associated. For instance, you could impose a tax on foods that fail to meet some healthiness standards. That would give manufacturers an incentive to make their food healthier (according to the standard) and give people a direct price incentive to prefer the healthier food. However, I doubt that will happen in the U.S. that's generally considered to be too much intrusion by the government.
By what deluded view of the world do you think that everyone over 35 leads a life of similar healthiness? Drug users? Chain smokers? Binge drinkers? Food gluttons? Soda drinkers? If you in ANY way believe that a skinny sub-35 year old on average is going to incur the same costs in old age as some unhealthy fatass, you really need to check out the top 5 health expenses in the US and the corresponding links to obesity. A hint: heart disease is one of them.
The guy that I was responding to complained he was paying more because people over 35 cost more. Chances are he's going to live to be older than 35. Of course, when he does, he'll probably just complain about "people over 45" and then "people over 55" and so on. The point being if he's in such good health he's probably going to belong to whatever age group he's complaining about unless it's small enough that it actually doesn't cost much. And he's correct that as you age, even the cost for healthy adults increase.
Your complain which has no bearing on what I wrote is that not everyone will use the same amount. So? Like at the buffet, some people will eat more and some will eat less. The biggest problem will be dealing the with people actually abusing the system, not the people who eat a little more than you.
I'd be more sympathetic to the "fat people cost more" rhetoric from conservatives if they weren't simultaneously championing the "How dare the First Lady recommend that we eat well and exercise" campaign. It's more just more insanity from crazy town.
Spoken like another clueless liberal that believes money, doctors, and drugs grow on trees...as if the only reason people die is because we let them and not because resources are limited. My mother waited 3 months for brain surgery to remove a tumor. Do you think the doctors were twiddling their thumbs in the meantime???
No idea, what they were doing. The Republican anti-health care ad prominently featured a Canadian woman who flew down the U.S. to get a benign brain tumour removed because she didn't want to wait 3 months to have it done by Canadian doctors. Maybe your mother got bumped because people willing to pay more pushed her down the list? I mean, I hear you can make a lot of money doing breast enhancements. I wonder how many potential brain surgeons followed the money in that direction? Of course, if your mother's brain tumour was benign, maybe she had to wait because it wasn't as important as the other procedures scheduled ahead of her. Or maybe she has a really cheap insurance company that is providing sub-standard care. There are simply too many possibilities from your meagre description to form any type of real opinion on why the delay occurred or whether it was entirely justified.
Don't assume I'm a "clueless liberal" because I disagree with you, it makes you look like a "clueless conservative". People who spend all their time trying to make sure they are getting exactly as much as everyone else are simply tiresome pendants who'd let the metaphorical boat sink if they think any of the other rowers are doing slightly less work than them. In my experience, they also usually the ones most likely to short-change everyone else for their own advantage.
So you'd rather spend money to punish people for being poor then spend money to help them stop being poor? Even if the second one is cheaper, helps more people and lowers the crime rate?
I take it you are unaware that in a group where ALL members will have similar medical costs over a lifetime, cost of "health insurance" for each member must be approximately the cost of all the health care required by each member?
True.
In other words, you're not actually saving ANYONE any money by doing health insurance - there's no spreading of risk when we all get old....
True in theory, false in practice. Pooling resources increases the bargaining power of your unit, as the unit gets larger, it has more power to negotiate better prices for service. A hospital would be much more willing to give a 10% discount to get 1000 heart surgeries a year than it is, to get 1. In the first case, the group has bargaining power, in the second case you need to surgery and the surgeon has all the bargaining power, unless you don't mind dying.
Actually, it's quite possible for costs to decrease, quality increase and waste to increase at the same time. If the insurance companies have a profit+overhead margin of 30% (A number I have seen floated a number of times) then costs can decrease 10%, quality/spending go up 10% and waste can increase 10%. Everyone but the health insurance company owners benefit.
There are lots of outcomes. There's an old saying about the Republicans: "They claim the government can do anything efficiently and then get elected so they can prove it".
Why not make the HSA laws MORE liberal, so I can save for my medical needs pre-tax....and make my own adult medical choices? Why shouldn't it be up to the individual to save for medical care much as we save to pay our utilities, mortgages, rent...etc?
Let me save my own money pre-tax....and then onlly have to pay a very small premium for emergency health insurance.
What do you do about the guy who graduates from college with a huge debt because of free market education and then during his first week on the job while he's walking to work, a drunk driver with no insurance jumps the sidewalk and pins him to a brick wall for an hour or two? Traumatic head injury puts him in a coma where he loses his newly earned job and leaves him with no money and no prospects and a half a million dollars of debt? I only ask, because this guy just graduated and he could use some advice after his accident. If he declares bankruptcy is he irresponsible? Is the hospital irresponsible for providing health care he may never be able to pay for? The medical insurance plan would have kicked in a month or two, but it won't now because the accident is a "pre-existing condition". What's the proper solution.
The problem with "responsible people paying their own way" is that medical care is not like retirement planning, you don't get 65 years of advance warning like you do for retirement. Given that most Americans (actually that goes for most people around the world, except maybe the Germans) can't even handle retirement planning, what makes you think they can handle unexpected medical emergencies too? When it comes to medical costs "responsible for myself" is a complete farce, only the lucky people get a chance to pretend to be "responsible".
Of course, if you step back and look at the big picture, you'll see that while you are currently subsidising people over 35 even though you are in really good health, chances are you will, yourself, live to be over 35, when you will end up being the one subsidised. In theory, every ends up paying about the same amount and everyone gets the same treatment. In pratice, it's close enough to theory that everyone other developed nation in the world uses a similar system.
I swear, conservative Americans are like the thin guy at an all-you-can-eat buffet who spends all his time complaining about how much the fat guy gets to eat.
That's what health care pools do, essentially you'd have to make health insurance illegal to avoid it. Of course, in other countries, you are required to tell (honestly) private health insurance company's if you smoke and they set the rate they charge based on whether or not you smoke (and how much, and for how long). So there is a reasonable middle ground here.
Because people like you go the emergency room at the hospital when they get really sick. You have no insurance and the hospital can't turn you away, so they have to increase the costs of every other service they provide to cover the cost of running the emergency room as a clinic for young, usually healthy, free loaders. Because they've increased the cost to cover free-loaders, the insurance company's have to pay more, so they in turn pass the increased cost onto everyone who does have health insurance.
The Republican position appears to be that American should be so responsible for their own health care that they can be irresponsible and force everyone else to pay for it. Because when it's the tragedy of the commons, it's not socialism.
Getting elected has become the goal, not doing what is right. Politians vote against something they used to be proponents of, just because it is the other party that proposed it now. Campaigns are solely focused on negativity
Believe it or not, looking in from the outside that only seems to describe one of the parties: the Republicans. The Democrats seem to be much more willing to work with the Republicans than the Republicans are willing to work with Democrats. It has reached the point where the Democrats are adopting Republican positions that the Republicans than abandon because they refuse to work with the Democrats. Case in point, "Obamacare" is the health care solution previously advocated by the Republicans. Of course, now the Republicans have had to move to "let them die" as their preferred health care system.
There are a few other theories like "internal variability", "solar flux", "natural effect" and "time delay" which are popular among "sceptics". However, each alternate theory has been evaluated and rejected because it doesn't match the facts as well as anthropogenic green-house gas induced global warming. Ironically, the self-branded "sceptics" are unable to be sceptical about their own pet theories.
Algae, plant growth and all other natural short-term sequestration methods can deal with less than 50% of the CO2 that humanity is producing. The rest of it enters the atmosphere and builds up. That's why CO2 levels have risen steadily for decades. The part that the natural processes can't deal with immediately, stays in the system for hundreds or thousands of years. It will eventually be removed by the slow natural processes but it would likely take more than 10,000 years for CO2 levels to return to pre-industrial levels if it was left entirely to natural processes.
You've got it pretty spot on. Although I think it's more like "As long as I don't have the pay the bills, why the hell should I care?". And that's the real message, humanity will adapt to the changes (barring genocidal wars) but society will pay the cost for Exxon's pollution. Anyone who doesn't like the bank bailouts should pay attention: Rex Tillerson just said "We're too big fail, the government will pay the Global Warming bills when they come due".
They're planning on having tax payers cover the costs for their actions over the next two centuries. We're talking estimated costs of around 75 trillion (2012) dollars over the next 200 years (that covers us until oil, coal, and natural gas supplies are exhausted and the post-oil climate stabilizes) to adapt to climate change.
That article is completely untrustworthy, here's an article about the same study that doesn't ramble incoherently and use pejorative slang every other sentence.
You might notice that the main point of the study has been distorted in the article you linked, only one group of people actually became more sceptical as their knowledge of science and math increased. That's "heirarchical individualists", or more plainly speaking they're capitalist libertarians. It's may even be more accurate to say that scientifically illiterate conservatives are not concerned as much about climate change because there are issues with how the study measured scientifically literate. The "higher levels" of scientific knowledge included such skill testing questions as "How long does it take the earth to rotate around the sun? A) 1 year, B) 1 month, C) 1 day", which if I remember correctly from the actual paper, only 34% of the responders were able to answer correctly. It seems that the bar "scientifically literate" seems to be set really, really low.
Einstein was either agnostic or atheist, he is on the record saying "I don't believe in a personal god". I think Newton was raised a protestant but became agnostic or atheist as a young adult, later he turned back to church as the dementia caused by years of drinking mercury turned him into an obsessive "mystic" who wasted his final years searching the Bible for the clues to unlock the mysteries of the universe.
I could be misinterpreting part of Newton's life, but Einstein was pretty clear about his views on God, he was not by any measure a believer in the Christian god.
Yes and no. What it does is assign a cost to CO2 emissions. People end paying the actual costs of economic production, rather than having governments (and thus tax payers) pay all of the costs of dealing with global warming. The people arguing against carbon taxes or cap and trade systems are essentially saying "I'd rather have government levy taxes to cover the costs incurred by corporations than have the corporations (and their customers) pay the costs".
In the past, similar systems have not had any significant impact. That's because corporations actively seek to minimise costs so what we've found is that if you assign a cost to an activity the amount of that activity declines rapidly and substantially. It happened with both CFCs and Sulfur Dioxide. Despite predictions of disastrous consequences, none were ever realised. Once the laws were passed, pollution levels declined and profits rose for the industry. As counter-intuitive as it may seem to hard core free marketeers, the regulations actually made the industries more efficient and more profitable.
To say that only those with what you think of as an education are qualified to vote is very condescending.
Either you are a terrible communicator, or are completely turned around. Right here, you're arguing my position. It's simple: giving anyone the power to decide what voters need to know in order to vote (and be able to recall correctly on the spot) is the same as giving those people the power to pick the winner. You're ignorant of actual history and actual politics if you think other wise. They will look at the voter demographics information and say "here's a set of questions that my side will score better on". If you could eliminate a chosen 10% of the voting pool from every presidential election, you could choose every president since Lyndon B. Johnson (Nixon and Reagan only won by more than 10% on their second terms) in 1964. Would you like to hand a political party 58 (or more) years of uncontested power?
First, I think gun toting NRA idiots are exactly the kind of people who shouldn't be allowed to vote.
The paranoid pea brained that make up their lot are the kind that is harming America the most.
fucking retards there
I would not hesitate to say are better qualified to vote than a good number of university educated people I know.
I'm only concerned that people know civics.
I don't discriminate that way.
Oh really? Because everything else you write says you do.
While in the past it may have been true that education and literacy could be denied a segment of the population, for at least 30 years this hasn't been true.
I wrote:
You do understand that there are many voters over the age of 30 right?
Do you understand the problem with your position now? If a problem has only been definitely fixed for the last 30 years, you can not expect it to have been fixed for everyone over the age of 30 since there is no maximum eligible age for voting there are people voting who were born 60 years before your "education problems" were fixed.
And you failed to address the real problem, that the test will immediately be used as a political weapon to disenfranchise people who vote "the wrong way", most likely it will also be used as a variation on "push-polling" to try and sway people towards voting for a favoured candidate. It's a really bad idea that opens up a whole new avenue of electoral abuses.
For an example of how capriciously we can definite suitable voters, I think you should be barred for voting for being ignorant enough to support an idea that was horribly abused before it was outlawed, for not knowing that it's illegal and not understand why it's illegal. Do you understand the problem, now? Or will you wait until angry people with guns decide to "contest" an election they weren't allowed to vote in?
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I think there's also a wider issue here, which is the right of governments to act with impunity when dealing with internal dissent. Both Russia and China are going to be facing similar protests in the foreseeable future. China's leadership is skating by on many issues because of the economic growth and prosperity being generated right now, however, when the Chinese economy finally hits the wall they're probably planning similar actions. Russia already has similar problems. They'd like to see Assad win because it would discourage their own dissidents.
The U.N. exists to prevent the U.S., China, England, France and Russia from going to war with each other. That is its primary purpose, that's why each of those nations have permanent security council seats and vetos. China and Russia and have been using their vetos to allow the Syrian bloodshed to play out. The implicit threat is that they would consider going to war over the issue if the rest of the world intervenes.
Actually, carbon taxes (and other solutions) can actually produce efficiency benefits without significantly impacting competitiveness. In the U. S. the Republican "base" doesn't support action on climate change because "it's not their problem". Think about it, the Republican demographics are sliding towards the elderly (age 60+). They've got a triple whammy of 1) not wanting anything done about climate change because they'll be dead before the "real effects show up", 2) they're retired and therefore on fixed incomes (so they are completely opposed to any tax increases and the easiest way to increase their spending money is to reduce taxes or shift the taxes to the young), and 3) they don't like today's "young people" so why should they sacrifice to help out those "lazy bums who can't find a job"?
Not being sick? Do you honestly believe that most people stop and ask themselves "what impact will eating this donut have on my insurance bills?"
Preventable poor health is the end result of many small decisions poorly made. I sincerely doubt insurance costs have much, if any, impact on those decisions. The costs are abstract, in the future, and dissociated from the behavior that would trigger them. After all, if the incentives actually worked the way you think they should, the U.S. should not have the highest rate of obesity in the developed world.
Furthermore as a counter-example to your hypothesis, you should note the difference between the U.S. and Canada. Canada has single-payer public health care, and has a reasonably similar culture and environment to the United States, however, Canada's Obesity rate is less than half the U.S. rate. By your reasoning those results should be reversed.
Thus since a single payer system reduces costs through economies of scale and bargaining power and does not seem to encourage unhealthy behavior, it seems like a very good solution.
If you want to motivate people to change their behavior you'd better make the costs more directly associated. For instance, you could impose a tax on foods that fail to meet some healthiness standards. That would give manufacturers an incentive to make their food healthier (according to the standard) and give people a direct price incentive to prefer the healthier food. However, I doubt that will happen in the U.S. that's generally considered to be too much intrusion by the government.
By what deluded view of the world do you think that everyone over 35 leads a life of similar healthiness? Drug users? Chain smokers? Binge drinkers? Food gluttons? Soda drinkers? If you in ANY way believe that a skinny sub-35 year old on average is going to incur the same costs in old age as some unhealthy fatass, you really need to check out the top 5 health expenses in the US and the corresponding links to obesity. A hint: heart disease is one of them.
The guy that I was responding to complained he was paying more because people over 35 cost more. Chances are he's going to live to be older than 35. Of course, when he does, he'll probably just complain about "people over 45" and then "people over 55" and so on. The point being if he's in such good health he's probably going to belong to whatever age group he's complaining about unless it's small enough that it actually doesn't cost much. And he's correct that as you age, even the cost for healthy adults increase.
Your complain which has no bearing on what I wrote is that not everyone will use the same amount. So? Like at the buffet, some people will eat more and some will eat less. The biggest problem will be dealing the with people actually abusing the system, not the people who eat a little more than you.
I'd be more sympathetic to the "fat people cost more" rhetoric from conservatives if they weren't simultaneously championing the "How dare the First Lady recommend that we eat well and exercise" campaign. It's more just more insanity from crazy town.
Spoken like another clueless liberal that believes money, doctors, and drugs grow on trees...as if the only reason people die is because we let them and not because resources are limited. My mother waited 3 months for brain surgery to remove a tumor. Do you think the doctors were twiddling their thumbs in the meantime???
No idea, what they were doing. The Republican anti-health care ad prominently featured a Canadian woman who flew down the U.S. to get a benign brain tumour removed because she didn't want to wait 3 months to have it done by Canadian doctors. Maybe your mother got bumped because people willing to pay more pushed her down the list? I mean, I hear you can make a lot of money doing breast enhancements. I wonder how many potential brain surgeons followed the money in that direction? Of course, if your mother's brain tumour was benign, maybe she had to wait because it wasn't as important as the other procedures scheduled ahead of her. Or maybe she has a really cheap insurance company that is providing sub-standard care. There are simply too many possibilities from your meagre description to form any type of real opinion on why the delay occurred or whether it was entirely justified.
Don't assume I'm a "clueless liberal" because I disagree with you, it makes you look like a "clueless conservative". People who spend all their time trying to make sure they are getting exactly as much as everyone else are simply tiresome pendants who'd let the metaphorical boat sink if they think any of the other rowers are doing slightly less work than them. In my experience, they also usually the ones most likely to short-change everyone else for their own advantage.
So you'd rather spend money to punish people for being poor then spend money to help them stop being poor? Even if the second one is cheaper, helps more people and lowers the crime rate?
I take it you are unaware that in a group where ALL members will have similar medical costs over a lifetime, cost of "health insurance" for each member must be approximately the cost of all the health care required by each member?
True.
In other words, you're not actually saving ANYONE any money by doing health insurance - there's no spreading of risk when we all get old....
True in theory, false in practice. Pooling resources increases the bargaining power of your unit, as the unit gets larger, it has more power to negotiate better prices for service. A hospital would be much more willing to give a 10% discount to get 1000 heart surgeries a year than it is, to get 1. In the first case, the group has bargaining power, in the second case you need to surgery and the surgeon has all the bargaining power, unless you don't mind dying.
That's supposed to be "They claim the government can't do anything efficiently and then get elected so they can prove it"
Actually, it's quite possible for costs to decrease, quality increase and waste to increase at the same time. If the insurance companies have a profit+overhead margin of 30% (A number I have seen floated a number of times) then costs can decrease 10%, quality/spending go up 10% and waste can increase 10%. Everyone but the health insurance company owners benefit.
There are lots of outcomes. There's an old saying about the Republicans: "They claim the government can do anything efficiently and then get elected so they can prove it".
Why not make the HSA laws MORE liberal, so I can save for my medical needs pre-tax....and make my own adult medical choices? Why shouldn't it be up to the individual to save for medical care much as we save to pay our utilities, mortgages, rent...etc?
Let me save my own money pre-tax....and then onlly have to pay a very small premium for emergency health insurance.
What do you do about the guy who graduates from college with a huge debt because of free market education and then during his first week on the job while he's walking to work, a drunk driver with no insurance jumps the sidewalk and pins him to a brick wall for an hour or two? Traumatic head injury puts him in a coma where he loses his newly earned job and leaves him with no money and no prospects and a half a million dollars of debt? I only ask, because this guy just graduated and he could use some advice after his accident. If he declares bankruptcy is he irresponsible? Is the hospital irresponsible for providing health care he may never be able to pay for? The medical insurance plan would have kicked in a month or two, but it won't now because the accident is a "pre-existing condition". What's the proper solution.
The problem with "responsible people paying their own way" is that medical care is not like retirement planning, you don't get 65 years of advance warning like you do for retirement. Given that most Americans (actually that goes for most people around the world, except maybe the Germans) can't even handle retirement planning, what makes you think they can handle unexpected medical emergencies too? When it comes to medical costs "responsible for myself" is a complete farce, only the lucky people get a chance to pretend to be "responsible".
Of course, if you step back and look at the big picture, you'll see that while you are currently subsidising people over 35 even though you are in really good health, chances are you will, yourself, live to be over 35, when you will end up being the one subsidised. In theory, every ends up paying about the same amount and everyone gets the same treatment. In pratice, it's close enough to theory that everyone other developed nation in the world uses a similar system.
I swear, conservative Americans are like the thin guy at an all-you-can-eat buffet who spends all his time complaining about how much the fat guy gets to eat.
Stop complaining and enjoy the buffet.
So the only reason you were living a healthy lifestyle was to save money on health insurance? That seems unlikely.
I'm not for them subsidizing me, either.
That's what health care pools do, essentially you'd have to make health insurance illegal to avoid it. Of course, in other countries, you are required to tell (honestly) private health insurance company's if you smoke and they set the rate they charge based on whether or not you smoke (and how much, and for how long). So there is a reasonable middle ground here.
Because people like you go the emergency room at the hospital when they get really sick. You have no insurance and the hospital can't turn you away, so they have to increase the costs of every other service they provide to cover the cost of running the emergency room as a clinic for young, usually healthy, free loaders. Because they've increased the cost to cover free-loaders, the insurance company's have to pay more, so they in turn pass the increased cost onto everyone who does have health insurance.
The Republican position appears to be that American should be so responsible for their own health care that they can be irresponsible and force everyone else to pay for it. Because when it's the tragedy of the commons, it's not socialism.
Getting elected has become the goal, not doing what is right. Politians vote against something they used to be proponents of, just because it is the other party that proposed it now. Campaigns are solely focused on negativity
Believe it or not, looking in from the outside that only seems to describe one of the parties: the Republicans. The Democrats seem to be much more willing to work with the Republicans than the Republicans are willing to work with Democrats. It has reached the point where the Democrats are adopting Republican positions that the Republicans than abandon because they refuse to work with the Democrats. Case in point, "Obamacare" is the health care solution previously advocated by the Republicans. Of course, now the Republicans have had to move to "let them die" as their preferred health care system.
Excellent job of proving the parent's point.
See IPCC, or easier to read: the human fingerprint in global warming.
There are a few other theories like "internal variability", "solar flux", "natural effect" and "time delay" which are popular among "sceptics". However, each alternate theory has been evaluated and rejected because it doesn't match the facts as well as anthropogenic green-house gas induced global warming. Ironically, the self-branded "sceptics" are unable to be sceptical about their own pet theories.
Algae, plant growth and all other natural short-term sequestration methods can deal with less than 50% of the CO2 that humanity is producing. The rest of it enters the atmosphere and builds up. That's why CO2 levels have risen steadily for decades. The part that the natural processes can't deal with immediately, stays in the system for hundreds or thousands of years. It will eventually be removed by the slow natural processes but it would likely take more than 10,000 years for CO2 levels to return to pre-industrial levels if it was left entirely to natural processes.
You've got it pretty spot on. Although I think it's more like "As long as I don't have the pay the bills, why the hell should I care?". And that's the real message, humanity will adapt to the changes (barring genocidal wars) but society will pay the cost for Exxon's pollution. Anyone who doesn't like the bank bailouts should pay attention: Rex Tillerson just said "We're too big fail, the government will pay the Global Warming bills when they come due".
They're planning on having tax payers cover the costs for their actions over the next two centuries. We're talking estimated costs of around 75 trillion (2012) dollars over the next 200 years (that covers us until oil, coal, and natural gas supplies are exhausted and the post-oil climate stabilizes) to adapt to climate change.
That article is completely untrustworthy, here's an article about the same study that doesn't ramble incoherently and use pejorative slang every other sentence.
You might notice that the main point of the study has been distorted in the article you linked, only one group of people actually became more sceptical as their knowledge of science and math increased. That's "heirarchical individualists", or more plainly speaking they're capitalist libertarians. It's may even be more accurate to say that scientifically illiterate conservatives are not concerned as much about climate change because there are issues with how the study measured scientifically literate. The "higher levels" of scientific knowledge included such skill testing questions as "How long does it take the earth to rotate around the sun? A) 1 year, B) 1 month, C) 1 day", which if I remember correctly from the actual paper, only 34% of the responders were able to answer correctly.
It seems that the bar "scientifically literate" seems to be set really, really low.
Einstein was either agnostic or atheist, he is on the record saying "I don't believe in a personal god". I think Newton was raised a protestant but became agnostic or atheist as a young adult, later he turned back to church as the dementia caused by years of drinking mercury turned him into an obsessive "mystic" who wasted his final years searching the Bible for the clues to unlock the mysteries of the universe.
I could be misinterpreting part of Newton's life, but Einstein was pretty clear about his views on God, he was not by any measure a believer in the Christian god.
We have intelligence, we appear to lack the wisdom to use it.
Yes and no. What it does is assign a cost to CO2 emissions. People end paying the actual costs of economic production, rather than having governments (and thus tax payers) pay all of the costs of dealing with global warming. The people arguing against carbon taxes or cap and trade systems are essentially saying "I'd rather have government levy taxes to cover the costs incurred by corporations than have the corporations (and their customers) pay the costs".
In the past, similar systems have not had any significant impact. That's because corporations actively seek to minimise costs so what we've found is that if you assign a cost to an activity the amount of that activity declines rapidly and substantially. It happened with both CFCs and Sulfur Dioxide. Despite predictions of disastrous consequences, none were ever realised. Once the laws were passed, pollution levels declined and profits rose for the industry. As counter-intuitive as it may seem to hard core free marketeers, the regulations actually made the industries more efficient and more profitable.
To say that only those with what you think of as an education are qualified to vote is very condescending.
Either you are a terrible communicator, or are completely turned around. Right here, you're arguing my position. It's simple: giving anyone the power to decide what voters need to know in order to vote (and be able to recall correctly on the spot) is the same as giving those people the power to pick the winner. You're ignorant of actual history and actual politics if you think other wise. They will look at the voter demographics information and say "here's a set of questions that my side will score better on". If you could eliminate a chosen 10% of the voting pool from every presidential election, you could choose every president since Lyndon B. Johnson (Nixon and Reagan only won by more than 10% on their second terms) in 1964. Would you like to hand a political party 58 (or more) years of uncontested power?
First, I think gun toting NRA idiots are exactly the kind of people who shouldn't be allowed to vote.
The paranoid pea brained that make up their lot are the kind that is harming America the most.
fucking retards there
I would not hesitate to say are better qualified to vote than a good number of university educated people I know.
I'm only concerned that people know civics.
I don't discriminate that way.
Oh really? Because everything else you write says you do.
You wrote:
While in the past it may have been true that education and literacy could be denied a segment of the population, for at least 30 years this hasn't been true.
I wrote:
You do understand that there are many voters over the age of 30 right?
Do you understand the problem with your position now? If a problem has only been definitely fixed for the last 30 years, you can not expect it to have been fixed for everyone over the age of 30 since there is no maximum eligible age for voting there are people voting who were born 60 years before your "education problems" were fixed.
And you failed to address the real problem, that the test will immediately be used as a political weapon to disenfranchise people who vote "the wrong way", most likely it will also be used as a variation on "push-polling" to try and sway people towards voting for a favoured candidate. It's a really bad idea that opens up a whole new avenue of electoral abuses.
For an example of how capriciously we can definite suitable voters, I think you should be barred for voting for being ignorant enough to support an idea that was horribly abused before it was outlawed, for not knowing that it's illegal and not understand why it's illegal. Do you understand the problem, now? Or will you wait until angry people with guns decide to "contest" an election they weren't allowed to vote in?