...Government has decided that it is a bad decision for people to not purchase health insurance. I know many perfectly reasonable, rational people who did not purchase health insurance before the ACA because it was not worth it to them. I made the opposite decision; but there is no way that I could ever objectively come to the conclusion that their decision (or mine) was a good or bad one. Value is entirely subjective and for someone to impose their own subjective values onto another is asinine, coercive, and straight up maddening.
Except the value of insurance isn't subjective from the perspective of everyone else. If one of those "reasonable, rational people who did not purchase health insurance" gets hit by a bus and has the good luck to survive, then almost certainly it'll be everyone else paying for their treatment in one way or another. That's a direct 'objective' reason why having everyone be covered is beneficial, but there are other reasons why the requirement is there.
One such reason would be that removing the ability of insurance companies to discriminate based on pre-existing conditions pretty much compels something like it. Otherwise your perfectly reasonable, rational people would just wait until they got sick and buy insurance, and drop it as soon as they were better. That behavior would, of course, destroy the insurance market pretty quickly, which might be a bit of a problem.
The chart is the data from the paper which is the basis for this story. Previous temperature record reconstructions only went back 2,000 years or so, this one went back over 11,000 years to provide more context. Even in the shorter 2,000 year chart the recent change is hard to parse since it's so nearly vertical. Anyway, the paper here was to show how the recent changes are far, far, larger and more rapid than any that have been seen since civilization began.
Well, the article didn't note the alarming part of that so well. The issue isn't the temperature at the moment so much as the really alarming rate of change. Here's a chart that documents the history and recent changes. Notice anything odd about the recent record relative to the entire temperature record going back to the dawn of agriculture?
Well, that raises the question of the "who controls the robots" question, doesn't it?. Presuming that they'd be as effective as you outline (I quite doubt it), they'd be great for making it domestically painless to invade and occupy places that one doesn't like for whatever reason, and I doubt that's a good thing (Iraq and Afghanistan only happened and went on as long as they did since even with the causalities, the pain was almost entirely borne by military families; heck, we didn't even increase taxes to actually pay for it). In short, I'd imagine that you might have a bit of a concern with autonomous foreign peacekeeping robots patrolling your neighborhood, and I'd expect that people in other places feel that way as well.
I remember a few things from the news, down through the years. I remember congress dipping into Social Security for money. And again. And again.
Social Security is something of a pyramid scheme, yes. It isn't truly sustainable. But, despite that, Social Security had surplus money, time and again. And, every time, Congress put their fingers into the surplus, and skimmed it off.
Congress hasn't done anything to the social security surpluses. Like just about any fund that prizes security over raw returns, the SS trust fund invests it's surpluses in treasury bonds. (largely) the same sort that you can buy. The money didn't go away, it wasn't skimmed, it's invested to grow until it's needed. The payroll tax was increased in 1986 specifically to build up the trust fund as it was recognized that the baby boom generation demographic bulge was going to cause issues. The commission that recommended the changes didn't take one thing into account, which is why there's a (relatively small) long term deficit; income inequality growth. Since there's a cap on the amount of income that's subject to the payroll tax (~$110k IIRC), increasing inequality leads to less income to the fund. If the cap were removed (or increased to account for the increase in inequality), there'd be no issue with SS funding.
Is it REALLY true, that the vast majority of Americans take out more than they pay in? Or, is it more likely that the vast majority of Americans don't LIVE long enough to collect what they have paid in? Maybe, just maybe, Social Security is going broke only because Congress can't control themselves, and they have spent our Social Security already!
Again, the SS trust fund is a real thing, with real assets. It's like saying that if you bought a treasury bond for your grandkid that congress spent his money. It's a silly assertion.
...and the Kindle 8.9 is $115 more than said Nexus 7. If you were so inclined, you could spend $85 more than the 8.9 and get the Nexus 10 if the larger size is what you want. If you're happy in the amazon ecosystem, then the kindle is great. If you want a more flexible tablet, just buy the Nexus. If you're spending that much, you might as well get what you want since it's not a big difference price-wise.
Why? Since when do app developers typically need to "modify, adapt, redistribute, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or create derivative works of the SDK"?
Put another way, this is precisely the same sort of crap we saw Bush and Obama do with the banking sector (using public funds to secure private losses that were not incurred due to a public purpose). In either case, the government stepped in to do what the market should have done in an otherwise private transaction with minimal to no public purpose.
To be fair, there's a strong public interest in the banking sector not melting down, so while we might have wanted to go about it differently, ultimately the public was going to have to stabilize the banking system and that was going to take money. The cronyism in the bailout was that we didn't then make the "guilty" parties pay for their damage or significantly fix the system.
The loan guarantees for 38 studios were just worse than usual example of local/state business "incentives" which are unfortunately quite common. They're not cronyism exactly since businesses can (and do) compete without these sorts of things, but they're typically needless giveaways of taxpayer money regardless. That being said, there are certainly areas where government investment makes sense, but this isn't one of those cases
Amazon wants to sell kindle devices. They're more effective at locking people into Amazon's ecosystem. Not providing their video content on stock Android gives them a big lever to push people to pick up the Kindle if they're considering their tablet choices. If Kindle weren't selling, I quite expect that they'd provide an instant video app for Android; there's no obvious technical reason why they couldn't.
Exactly. This needs to be a constitutional amendment. It will never pass either body of congress. Issa is being sloppy, but at least this is surprisingly well-intentioned for a Republican.
... until you realize that net neutrality rules/laws would be prohibited here as well. It's not well-intentioned, he's just found a great sounding way to spin giving the store away to the telcos. Oh, and the DMCA stuff would likely be considered intellectual property rather than internet law, so I'd quite expect that it'd not be covered here. Always look for the money.
Duverger's law is a principle which asserts that a plurality rule election system tends to favor a two-party system.
The wikipedia article specifically notes Canada and explains why there are more than 2 parties at the national level:
In the case of Canada, the highly regionalised parties are evident in province-by-province examination: while the multiparty system can be seen in the Canadian House of Commons, many of the provinces' elections are dominated by two-party systems. Quebec, for instance, is driven mainly by the separatist Parti Quebecois and the centre-left Liberal Party, while in Saskatchewan, it is the left-wing New Democratic Party and the centre-right Saskatchewan Party (a coalition of those affiliated with the Conservative and Liberal Parties). Unlike in the United States, where the two major parties are organized and unified at the federal, state and local level, Canada's federal and provincial parties generally operate as separate organizations.
So, Canada's a bit of an exception due to strong(er) regionalism, but first-past-the-post voting will tend toward two parties as the stable configuration.
Ron Paul libertarians are marginalized because they don't have the numbers for any significant electoral clout. They're committed, vocal, and active, but there aren't that many of them and they've not shown the ability to actually get people elected and that's ultimately what it comes down to. teabaggers, for all of their faults, can win primaries for their candidates and even get them elected (in republican districts). So, teabaggers are quite relevant in the republican party. The reason that they've not gotten what they want though is more that their message is quite toxic outside of the republican party.
The thing is that I don't suspect that the broad coalition parties that we have actually change things as much as one might presume. Were multiple parties actually workable in the US, libertarians would likely win a smallish number of seats in the legislature but wouldn't likely wield much influence. teabaggers would be comprised of what's currently the hardest core of the republican base, and would dominate the south, as they largely do now, and would be a fairly sizable right-wing block.
Third parties in the US don't work. With the way that we vote, 2 parties are the only stable configuration. That's not some grand conspiracy on the part of said parties, it's just the dynamics of the system. The result of that is that the each of the 2 parties have historically themselves been fairly broad coalitions who align around general principals. So, we might not have a Green party as such, but people with those views would be welcome in the Democratic coalition, for instance.
The way to foment change in this system is to push the major party most aligned with you in the direction that you'd like it to go. You do that by getting more candidates who agree with you to run and win. If your cause(es) are really that popular, then it shouldn't be so hard with a lot of work and focus. Third parties are an excellent way to make sure that this doesn't happen. In short, you win by taking over the party that's most closely aligned with your values.
The republican party is an excellent recent example for this actually. The teabaggers rebellion didn't run third party candidates, they ran in party primaries and started knocking out incumbents. The remainder of the party saw this in action and moved fairly quickly to align with the insurgent faction out of simple self-interest. The result was that the party shifted rather significantly to the right to accommodate them which meant that they ended up getting much of what they wanted.
So, in short, they're Democrats? You outline a passel of issues that would fall into the mainstream of the Democratic party, with a few outliers, but almost none align with the republican party of today.
The federal gas tax (a whopping 18.4 cents/gallon) goes to the highway trust fund to pay for highway construction and maintenance, so if enough people move onto alternative energy vehicles, we'll have to find another mechanism to pay for said roads. It's hardly some sort of nefarious plot.
The statutory rate in the US is 35% and is high when compared to other industrialized countries, but pretty much no-one pays that. The effective corporate tax rate in the US is closer to 27% due to various loopholes and deductions, which is right about average. All that Obama was talking about doing was eliminating the loopholes/deductions and dropping the statutory rate to keep it revenue neutral.
The "highest in the world" line sounds good, but is hugely misleading.
I agree that the "negotiation" was incompetently handled, but while conservative Democrats were themselves causing trouble, the focus was on making the bill (sufficiently) bi-partisan. That's what the whole "gang of six" (3 dems, 3 reps) charade was about. Since the lineage of the proposal was essentially republican (heck, it's nearly identical to the 1993 republican plan), it wouldn't have been unreasonable to presume that with some concessions that it could garner republican support. Of course, these are hardly normal times.
Now, it's possible that if this bill failed, we'd get a saner revamp of our healtcare system, but I don't see any evidence that might happen. This bill was just about the least that one could do which had a chance to impact things.
Finally, they're real treasury bonds, and like all treasury bonds, the money that they're purchased with is used by the government when they're purchased. That's hardly some sort of nefarious scheme; it's how all bonds work. They get paid back, with interest, over time. Now, since we control the SS administration, we could presumably give the bonds to the treasury or some such, but it'd still be a transfer of real assets. Of course, that'd be the blatent theft of trillions of dollars that were expressly paid by workers into the program, so I guess that it's important that said workers are properly misinformed so they don't notice.
That would be bad, but alas the bonds are real ones that pay interest and everything. The Social Security administration even has a FAQ and everything that cover this, though that'd take actually looking for yourself and perhaps not listening so much to people who're seeking to mislead you.
The people don't understand the ObamaCare plan - not entirely sure I do either, as it's a bit of a Frankenstein plan, rather than best plan which we couldn't get, not because of "Socialism", but because the major Healthcare companies have the GOP (and some Dems) so buttoned up in their pockets that the best plan of all could never get passed (the plan which cuts them largely out of the loop.)
Both houses of Congress were Democratic when the bill was passed. The GOP had absolutely nothing to do with any compromises. QED
The entire watered-down bill was a result of a year long attempt at good-faith negotiation with republicans. That, of course, was a repeated exercise in futility where the republicans would demand concessions, get said concessions and then move the goal posts. All the while, they used their media mouth-pieces to scare and misinform the public about the bill ("death panels, anyone?") to drive down it's public support.. Once it became apparent that republicans were negotiating in bad-faith, the bill had to further be hacked up to be able to be passed under reconcilliation, which was required to get past the de-facto 60 vote requirement that republican abuse of the filibuster created. So, I think that it's fair to say that the GOP had more than a little to do with the compromised bill.
Imagine if you will, there was no Social Security in the United States and any administration trying to get that system through today, with the way big business interests have so many politicians on a gilt leash. It'd be horrible and the only people really benefiting (besides lawyers, who seem to find a way to prosper from anything) would be businesses, not the people it was meant to serve.)
Yes... imagine if we didn't have a program in which all the revenue is thrown into the general fund instead of actually being saved for future shortfalls. That would be horrible.
Buying treasury bonds doesn't count as saving? Should they just stuff the Social Security surplus under the world's largest mattress?
I'd say that it's more logical to assume that the insurance corporations are acting as the sociopathic "persons" that they are. They want to make more money and see an opportunity to do so and thus are. For them, there's the added benefit that our generally worthless press coverage will muddy the waters enough that they'll able to blame the rate increases on the ACA, and so add pressure (along with the industry's prodigious lobbying dollars) to repeal the parts of the law that might cut into their profits. It's a win-win! (well, aside from society which loses, but some "persons" are more equal than others of course)
I have one and agree with this. It's really cool, but it's so dangerous that I don't break it out much at all. I went to the beach earlier this year and it was pretty cool to use it over the water. Back home, there's a non-trivial risk that I'll hit someone/something if I use it much outdoors.
I'd hardly consider cutting off their funding sources as "not taking any action", and further, that the U.S. didn't assassinate him doesn't mean that they're not behind the efforts to legally harass him. I realize that the U.S. seems to "reach for the stick" as a solution to most of it's problems nowadays, but it can be a bit more subtle than that when called for. They don't need him dead (heck, that'd likely be counterproductive), they just need to render him ineffective and make an example of him to anyone else who'd choose to be a nuisance in the future so they'll think twice.
And just who pays for the interest on those Treasury bonds? Why, the rest of the government, funded by taxes and borrowing. Money is fungible. As I said before, if we charged the tax but didn't provide the benefit, the government would have a much rosier financial picture.
Sure, if we just steal the money (they're real treasury bonds) or default on our debts it'd make things better in terms of held debt, but it'd be wrong to do so. Sure money is fungible, but SS income doesn't go into the general fund. The SS administration invests any surpluses in treasury bonds, like many pensions, since they're the safest investment around. The bonds fund government deficits, just like all bonds, but that they're held by the SS administration doesn't make them somehow unreal.
Consider the case of the hypothetical state of Columbia. Columbia decides to introduce a lottery to pay for improvements to public education. Of course, if the lottery earns less than the amount normally spent on public education, it merely replaces the dollars previously allotted from the general fund while freeing up those dollars to be spent elsewhere. Let us assume that the crack legislative team that wrote this included a special provision that - should the expenses of public education be lower than the money raised - the money must be saved, by buying state bonds. Money is saved for a long rainy day, for decades. Finally, the day arrives that the expenses are greater than the tax collected.
Now where does the money come from to pay those expenses? Well, the public school system redeems some bonds. Where does the money come to pay off the bonds? From the rest of the state government, which has to collect it in taxes, borrow it from elsewhere, or cut it from the funding of other programs - or cut education until it starts to provide surpluses again.
Borrowing money from yourself is a neat trick that sovereign states can get away with longer than anyone else, and it was critical to get people to support SS, but the program has always been supported on current revenues, and when it can no longer depend on those, it will start to take money from the rest of government.
What you seem to be missing is that the deficit that the bonds are sold to pay for exists regardless of whether the education department (in your example) or Social Security (in the actual case) buys some of them. So, if SS weren't buying bonds, they'd have just been sold to other investors. If you're creating a hypothetical where the bonds were issued simply to soak up a surplus, then it's nothing similar to SS, where the debt would be the same regardless but just held in other places.
Slashdot Mirror
...Government has decided that it is a bad decision for people to not purchase health insurance. I know many perfectly reasonable, rational people who did not purchase health insurance before the ACA because it was not worth it to them. I made the opposite decision; but there is no way that I could ever objectively come to the conclusion that their decision (or mine) was a good or bad one. Value is entirely subjective and for someone to impose their own subjective values onto another is asinine, coercive, and straight up maddening.
Except the value of insurance isn't subjective from the perspective of everyone else. If one of those "reasonable, rational people who did not purchase health insurance" gets hit by a bus and has the good luck to survive, then almost certainly it'll be everyone else paying for their treatment in one way or another. That's a direct 'objective' reason why having everyone be covered is beneficial, but there are other reasons why the requirement is there.
One such reason would be that removing the ability of insurance companies to discriminate based on pre-existing conditions pretty much compels something like it. Otherwise your perfectly reasonable, rational people would just wait until they got sick and buy insurance, and drop it as soon as they were better. That behavior would, of course, destroy the insurance market pretty quickly, which might be a bit of a problem.
The chart is the data from the paper which is the basis for this story. Previous temperature record reconstructions only went back 2,000 years or so, this one went back over 11,000 years to provide more context. Even in the shorter 2,000 year chart the recent change is hard to parse since it's so nearly vertical. Anyway, the paper here was to show how the recent changes are far, far, larger and more rapid than any that have been seen since civilization began.
Well, the article didn't note the alarming part of that so well. The issue isn't the temperature at the moment so much as the really alarming rate of change. Here's a chart that documents the history and recent changes. Notice anything odd about the recent record relative to the entire temperature record going back to the dawn of agriculture?
Well, that raises the question of the "who controls the robots" question, doesn't it?. Presuming that they'd be as effective as you outline (I quite doubt it), they'd be great for making it domestically painless to invade and occupy places that one doesn't like for whatever reason, and I doubt that's a good thing (Iraq and Afghanistan only happened and went on as long as they did since even with the causalities, the pain was almost entirely borne by military families; heck, we didn't even increase taxes to actually pay for it). In short, I'd imagine that you might have a bit of a concern with autonomous foreign peacekeeping robots patrolling your neighborhood, and I'd expect that people in other places feel that way as well.
I remember a few things from the news, down through the years. I remember congress dipping into Social Security for money. And again. And again.
Social Security is something of a pyramid scheme, yes. It isn't truly sustainable. But, despite that, Social Security had surplus money, time and again. And, every time, Congress put their fingers into the surplus, and skimmed it off.
Congress hasn't done anything to the social security surpluses. Like just about any fund that prizes security over raw returns, the SS trust fund invests it's surpluses in treasury bonds. (largely) the same sort that you can buy. The money didn't go away, it wasn't skimmed, it's invested to grow until it's needed. The payroll tax was increased in 1986 specifically to build up the trust fund as it was recognized that the baby boom generation demographic bulge was going to cause issues. The commission that recommended the changes didn't take one thing into account, which is why there's a (relatively small) long term deficit; income inequality growth. Since there's a cap on the amount of income that's subject to the payroll tax (~$110k IIRC), increasing inequality leads to less income to the fund. If the cap were removed (or increased to account for the increase in inequality), there'd be no issue with SS funding.
Is it REALLY true, that the vast majority of Americans take out more than they pay in? Or, is it more likely that the vast majority of Americans don't LIVE long enough to collect what they have paid in? Maybe, just maybe, Social Security is going broke only because Congress can't control themselves, and they have spent our Social Security already!
Again, the SS trust fund is a real thing, with real assets. It's like saying that if you bought a treasury bond for your grandkid that congress spent his money. It's a silly assertion.
...and the Kindle 8.9 is $115 more than said Nexus 7. If you were so inclined, you could spend $85 more than the 8.9 and get the Nexus 10 if the larger size is what you want. If you're happy in the amazon ecosystem, then the kindle is great. If you want a more flexible tablet, just buy the Nexus. If you're spending that much, you might as well get what you want since it's not a big difference price-wise.
Why? Since when do app developers typically need to "modify, adapt, redistribute, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or create derivative works of the SDK"?
Put another way, this is precisely the same sort of crap we saw Bush and Obama do with the banking sector (using public funds to secure private losses that were not incurred due to a public purpose). In either case, the government stepped in to do what the market should have done in an otherwise private transaction with minimal to no public purpose.
To be fair, there's a strong public interest in the banking sector not melting down, so while we might have wanted to go about it differently, ultimately the public was going to have to stabilize the banking system and that was going to take money. The cronyism in the bailout was that we didn't then make the "guilty" parties pay for their damage or significantly fix the system.
The loan guarantees for 38 studios were just worse than usual example of local/state business "incentives" which are unfortunately quite common. They're not cronyism exactly since businesses can (and do) compete without these sorts of things, but they're typically needless giveaways of taxpayer money regardless. That being said, there are certainly areas where government investment makes sense, but this isn't one of those cases
Amazon wants to sell kindle devices. They're more effective at locking people into Amazon's ecosystem. Not providing their video content on stock Android gives them a big lever to push people to pick up the Kindle if they're considering their tablet choices. If Kindle weren't selling, I quite expect that they'd provide an instant video app for Android; there's no obvious technical reason why they couldn't.
Exactly. This needs to be a constitutional amendment. It will never pass either body of congress. Issa is being sloppy, but at least this is surprisingly well-intentioned for a Republican.
... until you realize that net neutrality rules/laws would be prohibited here as well. It's not well-intentioned, he's just found a great sounding way to spin giving the store away to the telcos. Oh, and the DMCA stuff would likely be considered intellectual property rather than internet law, so I'd quite expect that it'd not be covered here. Always look for the money.
Duverger's law is a principle which asserts that a plurality rule election system tends to favor a two-party system.
The wikipedia article specifically notes Canada and explains why there are more than 2 parties at the national level:
So, Canada's a bit of an exception due to strong(er) regionalism, but first-past-the-post voting will tend toward two parties as the stable configuration.
I've had both and would heartily recommend the Logitech.
Ron Paul libertarians are marginalized because they don't have the numbers for any significant electoral clout. They're committed, vocal, and active, but there aren't that many of them and they've not shown the ability to actually get people elected and that's ultimately what it comes down to. teabaggers, for all of their faults, can win primaries for their candidates and even get them elected (in republican districts). So, teabaggers are quite relevant in the republican party. The reason that they've not gotten what they want though is more that their message is quite toxic outside of the republican party.
The thing is that I don't suspect that the broad coalition parties that we have actually change things as much as one might presume. Were multiple parties actually workable in the US, libertarians would likely win a smallish number of seats in the legislature but wouldn't likely wield much influence. teabaggers would be comprised of what's currently the hardest core of the republican base, and would dominate the south, as they largely do now, and would be a fairly sizable right-wing block.
Third parties in the US don't work. With the way that we vote, 2 parties are the only stable configuration. That's not some grand conspiracy on the part of said parties, it's just the dynamics of the system. The result of that is that the each of the 2 parties have historically themselves been fairly broad coalitions who align around general principals. So, we might not have a Green party as such, but people with those views would be welcome in the Democratic coalition, for instance.
The way to foment change in this system is to push the major party most aligned with you in the direction that you'd like it to go. You do that by getting more candidates who agree with you to run and win. If your cause(es) are really that popular, then it shouldn't be so hard with a lot of work and focus. Third parties are an excellent way to make sure that this doesn't happen. In short, you win by taking over the party that's most closely aligned with your values.
The republican party is an excellent recent example for this actually. The teabaggers rebellion didn't run third party candidates, they ran in party primaries and started knocking out incumbents. The remainder of the party saw this in action and moved fairly quickly to align with the insurgent faction out of simple self-interest. The result was that the party shifted rather significantly to the right to accommodate them which meant that they ended up getting much of what they wanted.
>that Red Hat passed the million dollar mark
Woah, a whole million dollars! That's *such* a lot of money. </sarcasm>
s/million/billion/g
Minor difference.
So, in short, they're Democrats? You outline a passel of issues that would fall into the mainstream of the Democratic party, with a few outliers, but almost none align with the republican party of today.
The federal gas tax (a whopping 18.4 cents/gallon) goes to the highway trust fund to pay for highway construction and maintenance, so if enough people move onto alternative energy vehicles, we'll have to find another mechanism to pay for said roads. It's hardly some sort of nefarious plot.
The statutory rate in the US is 35% and is high when compared to other industrialized countries, but pretty much no-one pays that. The effective corporate tax rate in the US is closer to 27% due to various loopholes and deductions, which is right about average. All that Obama was talking about doing was eliminating the loopholes/deductions and dropping the statutory rate to keep it revenue neutral. The "highest in the world" line sounds good, but is hugely misleading.
Now, it's possible that if this bill failed, we'd get a saner revamp of our healtcare system, but I don't see any evidence that might happen. This bill was just about the least that one could do which had a chance to impact things.
Finally, they're real treasury bonds, and like all treasury bonds, the money that they're purchased with is used by the government when they're purchased. That's hardly some sort of nefarious scheme; it's how all bonds work. They get paid back, with interest, over time. Now, since we control the SS administration, we could presumably give the bonds to the treasury or some such, but it'd still be a transfer of real assets. Of course, that'd be the blatent theft of trillions of dollars that were expressly paid by workers into the program, so I guess that it's important that said workers are properly misinformed so they don't notice.
http://www.ssa.gov/oact/progdata/fundFAQ.html
Both houses of Congress were Democratic when the bill was passed. The GOP had absolutely nothing to do with any compromises. QED
The entire watered-down bill was a result of a year long attempt at good-faith negotiation with republicans. That, of course, was a repeated exercise in futility where the republicans would demand concessions, get said concessions and then move the goal posts. All the while, they used their media mouth-pieces to scare and misinform the public about the bill ("death panels, anyone?") to drive down it's public support.. Once it became apparent that republicans were negotiating in bad-faith, the bill had to further be hacked up to be able to be passed under reconcilliation, which was required to get past the de-facto 60 vote requirement that republican abuse of the filibuster created. So, I think that it's fair to say that the GOP had more than a little to do with the compromised bill.
Yes... imagine if we didn't have a program in which all the revenue is thrown into the general fund instead of actually being saved for future shortfalls. That would be horrible.
Buying treasury bonds doesn't count as saving? Should they just stuff the Social Security surplus under the world's largest mattress?
I'd say that it's more logical to assume that the insurance corporations are acting as the sociopathic "persons" that they are. They want to make more money and see an opportunity to do so and thus are. For them, there's the added benefit that our generally worthless press coverage will muddy the waters enough that they'll able to blame the rate increases on the ACA, and so add pressure (along with the industry's prodigious lobbying dollars) to repeal the parts of the law that might cut into their profits. It's a win-win! (well, aside from society which loses, but some "persons" are more equal than others of course)
I have one and agree with this. It's really cool, but it's so dangerous that I don't break it out much at all. I went to the beach earlier this year and it was pretty cool to use it over the water. Back home, there's a non-trivial risk that I'll hit someone/something if I use it much outdoors.
I'd hardly consider cutting off their funding sources as "not taking any action", and further, that the U.S. didn't assassinate him doesn't mean that they're not behind the efforts to legally harass him. I realize that the U.S. seems to "reach for the stick" as a solution to most of it's problems nowadays, but it can be a bit more subtle than that when called for. They don't need him dead (heck, that'd likely be counterproductive), they just need to render him ineffective and make an example of him to anyone else who'd choose to be a nuisance in the future so they'll think twice.
And just who pays for the interest on those Treasury bonds? Why, the rest of the government, funded by taxes and borrowing. Money is fungible. As I said before, if we charged the tax but didn't provide the benefit, the government would have a much rosier financial picture.
Sure, if we just steal the money (they're real treasury bonds) or default on our debts it'd make things better in terms of held debt, but it'd be wrong to do so. Sure money is fungible, but SS income doesn't go into the general fund. The SS administration invests any surpluses in treasury bonds, like many pensions, since they're the safest investment around. The bonds fund government deficits, just like all bonds, but that they're held by the SS administration doesn't make them somehow unreal.
Consider the case of the hypothetical state of Columbia. Columbia decides to introduce a lottery to pay for improvements to public education. Of course, if the lottery earns less than the amount normally spent on public education, it merely replaces the dollars previously allotted from the general fund while freeing up those dollars to be spent elsewhere. Let us assume that the crack legislative team that wrote this included a special provision that - should the expenses of public education be lower than the money raised - the money must be saved, by buying state bonds. Money is saved for a long rainy day, for decades. Finally, the day arrives that the expenses are greater than the tax collected. Now where does the money come from to pay those expenses? Well, the public school system redeems some bonds. Where does the money come to pay off the bonds? From the rest of the state government, which has to collect it in taxes, borrow it from elsewhere, or cut it from the funding of other programs - or cut education until it starts to provide surpluses again. Borrowing money from yourself is a neat trick that sovereign states can get away with longer than anyone else, and it was critical to get people to support SS, but the program has always been supported on current revenues, and when it can no longer depend on those, it will start to take money from the rest of government.
What you seem to be missing is that the deficit that the bonds are sold to pay for exists regardless of whether the education department (in your example) or Social Security (in the actual case) buys some of them. So, if SS weren't buying bonds, they'd have just been sold to other investors. If you're creating a hypothetical where the bonds were issued simply to soak up a surplus, then it's nothing similar to SS, where the debt would be the same regardless but just held in other places.