Private insurance companies have insured people for decades without running up any unfunded liabilities.
Medicare, on the other hand, has run up $89 trillion in unfunded liabilities; in other words, $89 trillion in future obligations, for which we currently have no idea where the money will come.
If everyone was aware of the economy-crushing magnitude of these liabilities, it would have a rather negative impact on Medicare's satisfaction rating.
people would rather face a daily one-in-a-million chance of dying due to their own mistake than a daily one-in-a-billion chance of dying due to a machine failure.
Irrational people would rather face a daily one-in-a-million chance of dying due to their own mistake than a daily one-in-a-billion chance of dying due to a machine failure.
People who are like me would rather take the one-in-a-billion chance.
The highway patrol will have a lot less to do after the adoption of autonomous cars, so its overall expenses are lower. Where all citizens used to pay the patrol's operating costs through a combination of taxes and traffic fines, now we pay for their much lower operating costs through taxes only. The net savings to you and me should be substantial.
While it's bad if a guilty man goes free, it's far worse if an innocent man is killed.
This is a platitude -- and I wholly agree with this platitude. But what's really needed is unbiased, quantitative estimates of how often each of these negative outcomes occur. Without that, we can't even begin to make informed decisions about whether the cost of one outweighs the cost of the other.
I of course only mean the people buying cars this year.
You say "of course" as if it's obvious that "everybody" actually means "a small minority of people."
But let's roll with that. It makes the proposition that "next year almost no road repairs would get done" far more laughable. And it makes the gas-tax-adjustment remedy far more palatable. If 10% of Oregon's drivers traded non-hybrids for hybrids this year, Oregon's tax wouldn't have to go from 49.5 cents per gallon to 63; it would probably only have to go to 51 cents to keep revenue constant.
(By the way, I'm sure you can find a handful of Oregonians whose primary vehicle was purchased in the 1960s, but they pay very, very little in gas taxes. Their cars would have fallen apart decades ago if they were even moderate users of the highways. My car was manufactured in 2003, and all the "grannies" I know have cars newer than mine. That generation tends to buy into the automakers' fearmongering that if you don't replace your car every 3 - 5 years, you place yourself at risk of big maintenance costs. Automakers don't want grannies to realize the certainty that they will pay even bigger depreciation costs.)
Just as an investor can do world-class research and due diligence, with no guarantees that his investment will provide a positive return, there's no fail-safe way to choose a framework that will thrive.
I shudder to think what this newfound love of intrusive government would turn into if the religious right retook the reigns of power. The same power given the government to turn everyone into good little progressives won't suddenly vanish if next the government wants to turn you into good little worshippers.
Yep, the wrong villain. Nobody on the religious right is advocating mandatory attendance at worship services. In fact, it would really suck to have a bunch of people show up at church for no other reason than that the government compelled them to.
If heavy users of the roads shouldn't have to pay more than occasional users, where does it end? Maybe next you'll propose that people who go to the movies once a year should subsidize those who go twice a week, by making the cost the same for everyone.
It's especially a non-issue because it's easier than ever to bill the heavy users -- for example, with EZ-toll plazas that allow people to zip right through at highway speeds.
(And not everyone agrees that education should be free. Compulsory yes, but a case can be made that those who choose to bring kids into the world should own the cost of doing so. That argument was especially attractive when overpopulation seemed like a big threat. Now that birth rates have fallen drastically, not so much.)
if everybody bought a hybrid today, next year almost no road repairs would get done, because we wouldn't have the tax revenue
Pure fearmongering. If everybody bought a hybrid today, all it would take is a simple adjustment of Oregon's gas tax, from 49.5 cents per gallon to, say, 63 cents per gallon, to raise the same amount of revenue. (Hybrids get 100% of their energy from gasoline. Plug-in hybrids and EVs, which currently have a far smaller market share than hybrids, are a different matter.)
The summary loses all credibility when it says " the existing per-gallon gas tax has hit a point of diminishing returns". Gas can be taxed as much as you want. The Oregon gas tax, currently 49.5 cents per gallon, could be raised to $10 per gallon. That's not "diminishing returns," that's a whopping 1920% increase. There's already an infrastructure in place to collect gas taxes. It works smoothly.
This would mostly cause the price of shipping by truck to increase, increasing the costs of consumer goods... when I buy a good that has been shipped by truck, I am benefiting from the damage that truck caused to the highway. It's not actually fair to make truckers pay the majority of the cost.
Now which is it: are truckers going to pass 100% of that cost along to consumers, or are truckers going to eat 100% of that cost themselves? Your post is trying to have it both ways.
In reality, you would see something like this: 70% of the cost passed along to consumers, 30% absorbed by the trucking industry in the form of lower profits.
And you don't appear to realize that when you shift the cost of maintaining infrastructure from everybody to those specifically responsible for damaging infrastructure, other consumer costs will decrease by an equal amount.
It's a good thing when the price of a widget reflects the costs imposed on society by the production and shipment of that widget -- such as damage to infrastructure. And if it turns out some damage to infrastructure can be avoided by shipping things by rail, it would give a well-deserved boost to the rail industry.
Have you ever heard of economic sanctions that include "freezing the assets" of country X? At that point you're beyond worrying about pissing off country X, and your objective is to inflict economic hardship.
Consumers have as much to do with it as manufacturers. If consumers gave a rat's ass about the "Made in USA" label, it would have a non-negligible impact on these decisions.
I will leave the question of whether consumers should give a rat's ass for a different post.
Introducing the iLamp (requires iBulbs). See the problem?
No, I'd need more information to determine whether there's a problem. If iBulbs use 99% less power than standard bulbs, and emit a more pleasing light, and cost only 1% more than standard bulbs, it would be a safe bet that iBulbs would soon become the standard.
Sure... if Apple decided to make their Lightning-related intellectual property available royalty-free, that would be the best of both worlds for consumers. You're free to lobby Apple to do that. And they are free to consider your arguments, and respond with a yes, no, or no response at all.
For Apple the patent seems to be used to exclude competition
That's rather the whole reason anyone patents anything: as a reward for inventing something novel, you'll get relief from competition for a certain number of years. (Or, if you sell your intellectual property to someone who is better equipped to commercialize it, what the buyer is actually buying is relief from competition.)
If you plan to give your invention away royalty-free, why even go to the trouble of applying for a patent? Building prestige, I suppose: the consortium can brag that "we hold X number of patents," even if those patents otherwise don't confer any financial advantages.
When companies are coerced to use a connector that they would otherwise not use, it's one step further away from a free market, there's one less area where companies can compete to provide a superior experience, and consumers are not free to choose which solution best meets their needs.
It's in a manufacturer's best interest to stick to a standard connector, unless there is a compelling reason not to. Twits in government are generally not qualified to second-guess the decisions of world-class industrial designers, like Sir Jonathan Ive.
Every American who doesn't already have health insurance, and lives in one of the 25 states that didn't create a state exchange, is required by law to create an account on the HIPAA-violating Healthcare.gov site. (Under penalty of a fine that grows rapidly over the next few years. Unless you're John Roberts, who temporarily viewed it as a tax instead of a fine, in order to establish the ACA's constitutionality.)
You have helped to prove my point. The U.S. wasn't bankrupted by military expenditures that were far more massive than those that bankrupted the USSR. Why not? Adherence to free market principles had resulted in decades of economic growth, which in turn allowed the U.S. to easily absorb those massive military expenditures.
In 2013, U.S. military expenses as a percent of GDP are much lower than during the Cold War. What is currently bankrupting the U.S. is entitlements. (The $107 trillion in unfunded liabilities should scare you much more than the $17 trillion National Debt.)
Meanwhile the total personal income for 2012 in the US was $13.4 Trillion. Total number of workers is about 154 million. If we had a purely distributed wealth economy where everyone got a cut of the pot we would each make: 13.4T/154M = ~$86,500 per year.
Just one problem with your argument: total income has risen to $13.4 trillion only because the U.S. has adhered, somewhat, to free market principles. If you want to see what happens when you don't adhere to free market principles, look to the economy of the Soviet Union. In the USSR's final year of existence, after its policies had been in effect for about two generations, its GDP had shriveled and at last become smaller than that of tiny Denmark. You'll be pleased to know that the misery was spread quite equally. (Except for elites who still had gosdachas and consumed Stoli and caviar.)
I'd say "or, don't look to their example and take your fellow citizens down the same dismal path" -- except I'm one of your fellow citizens.
I'll take my "unfairly-small" share of a huge and growing pie over a "social-justice-approved" share of a shrinking pie any day, thank you very much.
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deals in Cuba that included a rather scary nuclear showdown that led directly into the cold war.
The Cold War began in 1947. The Cuban missile crisis happened in 1962.
Much of the reason we have so much debt is because the social security fund was robbed to pay for the [Vietnam] war and the space race.
Incorrect. A little bit of the reason we have so much debt is due to Vietnam-era borrowing. But to say "much of the reason" doesn't square with this fact: as of Oct. 2011, the Obama administration had incurred more debt that the first 41 presidents combined. (And that statistic is now quite dated. The national debt was $14.8 trillion in Oct. 2011, and $17.1 trillion now.) www.usdebtclock.org
Private insurance companies have insured people for decades without running up any unfunded liabilities.
Medicare, on the other hand, has run up $89 trillion in unfunded liabilities; in other words, $89 trillion in future obligations, for which we currently have no idea where the money will come.
If everyone was aware of the economy-crushing magnitude of these liabilities, it would have a rather negative impact on Medicare's satisfaction rating.
people would rather face a daily one-in-a-million chance of dying due to their own mistake than a daily one-in-a-billion chance of dying due to a machine failure.
Irrational people would rather face a daily one-in-a-million chance of dying due to their own mistake than a daily one-in-a-billion chance of dying due to a machine failure.
People who are like me would rather take the one-in-a-billion chance.
In theory, here's how it should work.
The highway patrol will have a lot less to do after the adoption of autonomous cars, so its overall expenses are lower. Where all citizens used to pay the patrol's operating costs through a combination of taxes and traffic fines, now we pay for their much lower operating costs through taxes only. The net savings to you and me should be substantial.
that there is a 20% chance that she never shot the prisoner
Interesting choice of pronoun. I'd guess that throughout history, there's a 99.8% chance that a given firing squad member is not female.
While it's bad if a guilty man goes free, it's far worse if an innocent man is killed.
This is a platitude -- and I wholly agree with this platitude. But what's really needed is unbiased, quantitative estimates of how often each of these negative outcomes occur. Without that, we can't even begin to make informed decisions about whether the cost of one outweighs the cost of the other.
I of course only mean the people buying cars this year.
You say "of course" as if it's obvious that "everybody" actually means "a small minority of people."
But let's roll with that. It makes the proposition that "next year almost no road repairs would get done" far more laughable. And it makes the gas-tax-adjustment remedy far more palatable. If 10% of Oregon's drivers traded non-hybrids for hybrids this year, Oregon's tax wouldn't have to go from 49.5 cents per gallon to 63; it would probably only have to go to 51 cents to keep revenue constant.
(By the way, I'm sure you can find a handful of Oregonians whose primary vehicle was purchased in the 1960s, but they pay very, very little in gas taxes. Their cars would have fallen apart decades ago if they were even moderate users of the highways. My car was manufactured in 2003, and all the "grannies" I know have cars newer than mine. That generation tends to buy into the automakers' fearmongering that if you don't replace your car every 3 - 5 years, you place yourself at risk of big maintenance costs. Automakers don't want grannies to realize the certainty that they will pay even bigger depreciation costs.)
Just as an investor can do world-class research and due diligence, with no guarantees that his investment will provide a positive return, there's no fail-safe way to choose a framework that will thrive.
Do your best, and good luck.
I shudder to think what this newfound love of intrusive government would turn into if the religious right retook the reigns of power. The same power given the government to turn everyone into good little progressives won't suddenly vanish if next the government wants to turn you into good little worshippers.
Yep, the wrong villain. Nobody on the religious right is advocating mandatory attendance at worship services. In fact, it would really suck to have a bunch of people show up at church for no other reason than that the government compelled them to.
If heavy users of the roads shouldn't have to pay more than occasional users, where does it end? Maybe next you'll propose that people who go to the movies once a year should subsidize those who go twice a week, by making the cost the same for everyone.
It's especially a non-issue because it's easier than ever to bill the heavy users -- for example, with EZ-toll plazas that allow people to zip right through at highway speeds.
(And not everyone agrees that education should be free. Compulsory yes, but a case can be made that those who choose to bring kids into the world should own the cost of doing so. That argument was especially attractive when overpopulation seemed like a big threat. Now that birth rates have fallen drastically, not so much.)
if everybody bought a hybrid today, next year almost no road repairs would get done, because we wouldn't have the tax revenue
Pure fearmongering. If everybody bought a hybrid today, all it would take is a simple adjustment of Oregon's gas tax, from 49.5 cents per gallon to, say, 63 cents per gallon, to raise the same amount of revenue. (Hybrids get 100% of their energy from gasoline. Plug-in hybrids and EVs, which currently have a far smaller market share than hybrids, are a different matter.)
The summary loses all credibility when it says " the existing per-gallon gas tax has hit a point of diminishing returns". Gas can be taxed as much as you want. The Oregon gas tax, currently 49.5 cents per gallon, could be raised to $10 per gallon. That's not "diminishing returns," that's a whopping 1920% increase. There's already an infrastructure in place to collect gas taxes. It works smoothly.
This would mostly cause the price of shipping by truck to increase, increasing the costs of consumer goods... when I buy a good that has been shipped by truck, I am benefiting from the damage that truck caused to the highway. It's not actually fair to make truckers pay the majority of the cost.
Now which is it: are truckers going to pass 100% of that cost along to consumers, or are truckers going to eat 100% of that cost themselves? Your post is trying to have it both ways.
In reality, you would see something like this: 70% of the cost passed along to consumers, 30% absorbed by the trucking industry in the form of lower profits.
And you don't appear to realize that when you shift the cost of maintaining infrastructure from everybody to those specifically responsible for damaging infrastructure, other consumer costs will decrease by an equal amount.
It's a good thing when the price of a widget reflects the costs imposed on society by the production and shipment of that widget -- such as damage to infrastructure. And if it turns out some damage to infrastructure can be avoided by shipping things by rail, it would give a well-deserved boost to the rail industry.
If I were an enemy of the Slashdot community, I'd make posts suggesting that Slashdot editors can't see obvious FUD.
And Borrowing was not an option available to the USSR? Weak, anonymous coward, weak.
Have you ever heard of economic sanctions that include "freezing the assets" of country X? At that point you're beyond worrying about pissing off country X, and your objective is to inflict economic hardship.
And China's markets are not free enough to regulate excesses; central planning leads to vast wastes of resources, such as building "ghost cities": http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324412604578515382905495900
Consumers have as much to do with it as manufacturers. If consumers gave a rat's ass about the "Made in USA" label, it would have a non-negligible impact on these decisions.
I will leave the question of whether consumers should give a rat's ass for a different post.
Introducing the iLamp (requires iBulbs). See the problem?
No, I'd need more information to determine whether there's a problem. If iBulbs use 99% less power than standard bulbs, and emit a more pleasing light, and cost only 1% more than standard bulbs, it would be a safe bet that iBulbs would soon become the standard.
Sure... if Apple decided to make their Lightning-related intellectual property available royalty-free, that would be the best of both worlds for consumers.
You're free to lobby Apple to do that.
And they are free to consider your arguments, and respond with a yes, no, or no response at all.
For Apple the patent seems to be used to exclude competition
That's rather the whole reason anyone patents anything: as a reward for inventing something novel, you'll get relief from competition for a certain number of years. (Or, if you sell your intellectual property to someone who is better equipped to commercialize it, what the buyer is actually buying is relief from competition.)
If you plan to give your invention away royalty-free, why even go to the trouble of applying for a patent? Building prestige, I suppose: the consortium can brag that "we hold X number of patents," even if those patents otherwise don't confer any financial advantages.
When companies are coerced to use a connector that they would otherwise not use, it's one step further away from a free market, there's one less area where companies can compete to provide a superior experience, and consumers are not free to choose which solution best meets their needs.
It's in a manufacturer's best interest to stick to a standard connector, unless there is a compelling reason not to. Twits in government are generally not qualified to second-guess the decisions of world-class industrial designers, like Sir Jonathan Ive.
Every American who doesn't already have health insurance, and lives in one of the 25 states that didn't create a state exchange, is required by law to create an account on the HIPAA-violating Healthcare.gov site. (Under penalty of a fine that grows rapidly over the next few years. Unless you're John Roberts, who temporarily viewed it as a tax instead of a fine, in order to establish the ACA's constitutionality.)
You have helped to prove my point. The U.S. wasn't bankrupted by military expenditures that were far more massive than those that bankrupted the USSR. Why not? Adherence to free market principles had resulted in decades of economic growth, which in turn allowed the U.S. to easily absorb those massive military expenditures.
In 2013, U.S. military expenses as a percent of GDP are much lower than during the Cold War. What is currently bankrupting the U.S. is entitlements. (The $107 trillion in unfunded liabilities should scare you much more than the $17 trillion National Debt.)
Meanwhile the total personal income for 2012 in the US was $13.4 Trillion. Total number of workers is about 154 million. If we had a purely distributed wealth economy where everyone got a cut of the pot we would each make: 13.4T/154M = ~$86,500 per year.
Just one problem with your argument: total income has risen to $13.4 trillion only because the U.S. has adhered, somewhat, to free market principles. If you want to see what happens when you don't adhere to free market principles, look to the economy of the Soviet Union. In the USSR's final year of existence, after its policies had been in effect for about two generations, its GDP had shriveled and at last become smaller than that of tiny Denmark. You'll be pleased to know that the misery was spread quite equally. (Except for elites who still had gosdachas and consumed Stoli and caviar.)
I'd say "or, don't look to their example and take your fellow citizens down the same dismal path" -- except I'm one of your fellow citizens.
I'll take my "unfairly-small" share of a huge and growing pie over a "social-justice-approved" share of a shrinking pie any day, thank you very much.