So, if this is the case there is no hope until our electoral system is fixed. Mandatory voting is the only way forward.
Actually, I think there is plenty of hope: more and more people are figuring out that government is not the solution to their problems, and instead is a big con. That's not expressed in low voter participation rates (those haven't changed much for the past 100 years), it's expressed in people rejecting establishment candidates and media.
Dysfunctional programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and ACA are actually easy to get rid of: just produce enough political chaos and gridlock so that Congress doesn't get around to propping them up anymore; they'll collapse under their own weight.
The right move economically is to pardon these people and make them participate in the legal economy like everyone else.
No, that is absolutely not the right thing to do. The US tried that in the 1980's, and it made the problem explode. It also gave Democrats a net of several million votes, which is of course why Democrats are so eager advocating this again.
As I recall, the cost to deport someone is in the neighborhood of $30k.
The cost in 2016 was around $10k and that comes down as the process becomes more efficient and streamlined. Many of these people can be brought to self-deport by going after employers and businesses that deal with them. And even $30k would still be cheap compared to the lifetime cost of admitting this large, uneducated, unskilled population.
There is zero economic justification for deportation
If we had a free market, that would be true. But given the large degree of redistribution in our current welfare and tax system, letting in low skill workers is a huge net cost. It doesn't matter how hard they work.
I'm surprised you would bother to make the argument.
So government funding of basic research is also subsidizing consumption? How about funding of education?
We were talking about redistribution of money from rich people to poor people with the goal of increasing consumption. You and others made the argument that that is good for the economy, and I said that that's wrong.
Funding of basic research or education may or may not be "subsidizing consumption", and they may or may not be bad ideas for other reasons; it's simply not what we were discussing.
Roads are just money pits as well?
Roads are not investments, they are a consumable paid for by road users (via gas taxes).
Here's reality for you: no business is going to seriously invest in anything that has a longer time horizon than 50 years, because guess what? The investors are all going to be dead by then. Who cares if it makes a trillion dollars in 2100?
Here is reality for you: no politician is going to seriously invest in... anything, because they simply aren't motivated to produce a return on investment; if their policies fail, they usually simply blame someone else for those failures, and that usually happens long after they care about reelection and when their government pensions are already secure.
Here is another reality for you: businesses and investors invest in things with long time horizons all the time. Why? Because investors take into account future returns on investments even if they are realized long after their death. A zero coupon bond (a bond that pays no interest) that matures at $1000 in 100 years isn't worthless today, it's worth about $7. In 20 years, it's worth about $20, in 50 years, about $90, etc. And you can buy and sell it at pretty much those prices and realize the interest that is due to you, even though the bond issuer pays no interest at all.
That is, the data shows that the problems with costs in the US healthcare system are in large part due to excessive spending on the elderly. And that's because there is currently no political will to limit this spending: doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies make a financial killing from this population for no substantive gains in life expectancy or quality of life.
A single payer pool would include healthy people who would drive those numbers down.
Forcing young people to pay for the healthcare of old people doesn't "drive down" any costs and doesn't make healthcare "more efficient", it simply subsidizes the excessive consumption of health care by older people through imposing regressive taxes on poorer young people. It's morally wrong. In fact, I'd call it obscene. And it's politically unworkable in the long run.
I stand by my statement: any healthcare reform needs to start by sharply cutting Medicare/Medicaid costs down to European levels (contrary to what you believe, it makes little difference whether we talk about European averages or just elderly populations). Only then does it make sense to talk about extending Medicare to everybody.
While you have some valid points, I'm afraid I don't trust government reports on employment. They is too much observable manipulation going on for me to trust the parts I can't see.
Government may well underestimate unemployment, but it is absurd to argue (and there is no evidence) that it would do so to hide the effects of automation on the labor market. Furthermore, since automation has replaced the vast majority of jobs over the past century, the effect would be big.
In any case, you're basically saying that you just know that automation destroys jobs irreplaceably, even though you don't have any evidence, and even though it contradicts the data we have. That's not much of an argument on your part.
Compare it to the 50's and 60's, and we're at around the same level of U3 now that they had at the worst of their recessions
If that were due to automation, then U3 wouldn't have fallen to such low values in 2000 and 2008, when it was comparable to the average in the 1960's. And notice that U3 today is with a much larger labor force than in the 1960's.
and labor force participation is still declining even as the economy recovers. That's not a good thing.
That has nothing to do with automation, it has to do with baby boomers retiring, kids staying in school too long, and the welfare state encouraging both men and women to drop out of the workforce.
The big change since 1980 hasn't been automation, which has been going on gradually since the 19th century; the big change has been the massive rise in both legal and illegal immigration, from about 4.7% of the population to about 14% of the population. The vast majority of those immigrants are low skill, low education workers (with only a smaller population of high skill workers), and it is those people who have been displacing the US working class. Note that the absolute 10% increase in immigrants is about the size of the entire U3 unemployment rate.
It is cynical and hypocritical for Democrats and progressives to complain about how automation displaces blue collar workers, when they support vastly increasing the population of low skill workers in the US by importing them.
Well, you won't win elections that way in the US because the American middle class is greedy and entitled. It is, however, the traditional attitude of people in German and Scandinavian culture, which is why their welfare state differs so radically from ours.
Since when is this a rule? What the heck is "hardships" anyways?
If you want to know more, read some basic economics.
Often it's a bad idea to trade consumption for investment.
Well, and whether it is or is not is something best decided by each individual; redistributing money via government, on the other hand, massively reduces investments and massively subsidizes consumption.
No, I'm saying the ideal is no labor needed. That doesn't mean that we can attain that ideal any time soon, but that should be the goal we approach, even if we will never fully reach it. The less we NEED to work, the more freedom we have, and the less stressful our lives are.
Yeah, and the fact that you think that ought to be "the goal" makes you an utterly deplorable human being. And while you are free to jump off the cliff yourself that way, don't force the rest of us to jump with you.
provide protections for illegal immigrants so that they can't be exploited
If you jail people who hire illegal immigrants, you don't have to provide protections, since then illegal immigrants can't work anymore in the US.
Your math is assuming that everybody makes roughly minimum wage, but yeah, the ideal is ZERO people needing to work. So, that would get us halfway there.
You live in an economic fantasy land.
until we're in Jetsons/Star Trek post-labor territory.
From the point of view of someone living 300 years ago, we already live in "post labor territory": all the needs an average person could possibly want fulfilled 300 years ago are fulfilled today on no work at all. But today, people aren't satisfied with what would have been a royal standard of living back then.
And 300 years from now, people will want their personal matter synthesizers, their rejuvenated clone bodies, their megawatt home power stations, and their personal spacecraft. And that will still require massive amounts of labor to invent, create, and supply.
In fact, the biggest population dropping out of the labor force is (1) retiring baby boomers, and (2) young workers aged 16-25: http://tinyurl.com/jhrrhoz That's mainly the result of misguided economic policies keeping kids in school/college longer than it makes sense.
So, your analysis is strongly contradicted by facts. Automation clearly causes some jobs to go away, but they are obviously replaced by new jobs.
In the long run, this is true. But in the short run, there can be dislocation of workers that lack skills for new jobs.
True. But if we design our economy around what's good in the short run, we end up with with what we are seeing: stagnant incomes and rising debt. Pretty much the most fundamental rule of economics and life is that if you want success in the long term, you need to endure hardships in the short term.
However, we should be automating more, but aren't, because of the cheap labor he's complaining isn't cheap enough.
That cheap labor is largely supplied by illegal immigration. Meaning, if you don't want so much cheap labor and more automation, just deport illegal immigrants.
Make the minimum wage $30 an hour, and anything that can be done by a robot will be soon.
Correct. However, since that's above median family income, it means that more than half of families (let alone Americans) will fall below it.
Paired with appropriate socioeconomic reforms, eventually landing on a UBI, and then things are better for everyone.
If you set the minimum wage to $30 and then redistribute income via a UBI, the effect will be (roughly) that everybody will be living at about a $15/h wage, with only half the people working.
Wages should be considerably outpacing inflation, and that improves the economy, since the working class actually spends their income
Take a potato. You can consume it, or you can cut it up and plant it. If you do the latter, you'll have several potatoes a year later. It's the same with money: if you consume it right now, you end up with less a year from now than if you plant it. Deferring consumption and investing the potato gives you more down the road.
It's the same with money. Redistributing money to increase consumption does not help the economy in the long run, it just creates a short term "stimulus". For long term growth, you need less consumption and more investment.
The definition of "unemployment" is useful for short-term planning, not analyzing long term trends.
The number you actually want to look at is labor force participation rate; that dropped sharply under Obama, in part due to demographics, in part due to Obama's economic policies.
The US System is not government run, it's government regulated, for now. Both links you included, don't show what you are claiming.
The US has two systems: public and private. Medicare/Medicaid are fully government run health insurance systems: the government collects the money, negotiates services, and pays out claims. It's places like Germany and Switzerland that have all-private systems with regulation, so the US actually already has a "more socialist" and more government run system than those countries. The difference is that countries like Germany and Switzerland do a better job at regulating their private systems than the US does at running its public systems.
The medicaid expansion you reference did not statistically improve the health of relatively healthy people, big surprise. It did give them better financial and mental health outcomes. I wouldn't call that a failure.
First of all, given that they are using statistical confidence, just by chance, you expect one in 20 variables to improve accidentally. Second, if you transfer large amounts of money from a population you don't measure to a population you do measure, of course, the financial well being of the population you measure is going to improve. So, that reasoning is b.s. And, regardless, it is trying to distract from the fundamental fact that the Oregon experiment failed to deliver the outcomes that expansion of public coverage was first and foremost supposed to deliver: better physical health outcomes.
The VA's patient load increased way faster then funding. [...] they just want it funded properly so it provides the services they were promised. It's certainly the least expensive way to provide those services.
Absolutely false. Veterans cared for through the VA cost even more per year on average than people covered in other ways. (The reason this gets obscured and people cite absurdly low per person figures for VA patients is because the VA only pays for about 1/3 of the medical costs of veterans; the rest is reimbursed by other carriers.)
You can see that American's have less doctor visits, they spend more without getting better treatment.
Correct. And single payer proposals do nothing to address this. Instead, what they propose is to simply extract even more money from American taxpayers and put it into the same broken system.
Now, from your your links:
In contrast, the U.S. devotes a relatively small share of its economy to social services, such as housing assistance, employment programs, disability benefits, and food security.
Actually, the US devotes a fairly average share of its economy to social services.
But that is the wrong measure anyway; social services shouldn't be measured relative to the economy. The correct measure is the absolute amount per capita the US spends on social services, and that is near the top.
Finally, despite its heavy investment in health care, the U.S. sees poorer results on several key health outcome measures such as life expectancy and the prevalence of chronic conditions.
Correct. And that tells you that increased health care spending and coverage does not improve life expectancy or an increase in health. Much of US health care spending is the consequence of obesity, substance abuse, single parenthood, homelessness, and promiscuity, and increased healthcare is not effective in addressing any of those problems. In fact, we have natural experiments in the US: Asian Americans and Latinos have the highest life expectancies in th
Despite egregious twisting by modern spin doctors [...] words still have meaning.
Correct. And this group claims that opposing DRM is a question of "ethics". How is it a question of "ethics"? How do their actions and demands relate to specific, identifiable ethical principles? The message they are delivering is “You Don’t Own Our Voices”. How does incorporating DRM into commercial products or into W3C standards translate into anybody "owning their voices"?
this group's beliefs about DRM clearly align with yours
Absolutely not. I think there is nothing unethical about the W3C writing down a standard for DRM, nor is there anything unethical about Microsoft or Google using DRM. I simply think DRM is undesirable and I would prefer for the W3C not to standardize it, based on utilitarian arguments, not ethical arguments. It's similar to my stance on drug use: using drugs is undesirable, not unethical, and people who try to frame drug use in term of ethics are "spin doctors" and closet-totalitarian pricks.
You know you have that backwards, the government run parts of the system are the only ones that work.
In what way "does it work"? The US government-run system spends nearly three times as much per patient as European systems. Medicaid expansion was not beneficial to patient health compared to remaining uninsured. And the publicly run VA system is a disaster.
The private insurance industry and hospital system milk each end and we're stuck in the middle.
I have been insured through several employers and US private insurance companies, and they were uniformly better than any insurance I have had in Europe: they covered more, offered more options, appointments were quicker, facilities were a lot nicer.
I definitely think tying insurance to employment is a major problem, and some sort of public option is the only long term solution.
Whether insurance is public or private, and whether it's tied to employment are two entirely unrelated issues. What the US needs is portable private insurance.
Why does this work for every other industrialized nation, but it won't work in the US? Are we too stupid, is that what you really think?
European systems are almost all two-tiered systems in which most people get limited, low-cost services, and high income earners either get some form of private insurance or pay out of pocket in the private market. The "public" systems are strictly cost-controlled, limiting what kinds of drugs and treatments you can get, paying staff poorly, keeping facilities plain, and often having long waiting times for anything other than emergency procedures.
Why doesn't that work in the US? Because any politician that attempts to cut back per-patient spending to European levels ($3000-4000/patient/year) in the US public system would get lynched by the medical lobby, the pharmaceutical lobby, and the powerful voting bloc of older voters.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I think there is plenty of hope: more and more people are figuring out that government is not the solution to their problems, and instead is a big con. That's not expressed in low voter participation rates (those haven't changed much for the past 100 years), it's expressed in people rejecting establishment candidates and media.
Dysfunctional programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and ACA are actually easy to get rid of: just produce enough political chaos and gridlock so that Congress doesn't get around to propping them up anymore; they'll collapse under their own weight.
No, that is absolutely not the right thing to do. The US tried that in the 1980's, and it made the problem explode. It also gave Democrats a net of several million votes, which is of course why Democrats are so eager advocating this again.
The cost in 2016 was around $10k and that comes down as the process becomes more efficient and streamlined. Many of these people can be brought to self-deport by going after employers and businesses that deal with them. And even $30k would still be cheap compared to the lifetime cost of admitting this large, uneducated, unskilled population.
If we had a free market, that would be true. But given the large degree of redistribution in our current welfare and tax system, letting in low skill workers is a huge net cost. It doesn't matter how hard they work.
Well, then continue to be surprised.
Well, and I said "for everybody" and I meant it.
We were talking about redistribution of money from rich people to poor people with the goal of increasing consumption. You and others made the argument that that is good for the economy, and I said that that's wrong.
Funding of basic research or education may or may not be "subsidizing consumption", and they may or may not be bad ideas for other reasons; it's simply not what we were discussing.
Roads are not investments, they are a consumable paid for by road users (via gas taxes).
Here is reality for you: no politician is going to seriously invest in ... anything, because they simply aren't motivated to produce a return on investment; if their policies fail, they usually simply blame someone else for those failures, and that usually happens long after they care about reelection and when their government pensions are already secure.
Here is another reality for you: businesses and investors invest in things with long time horizons all the time. Why? Because investors take into account future returns on investments even if they are realized long after their death. A zero coupon bond (a bond that pays no interest) that matures at $1000 in 100 years isn't worthless today, it's worth about $7. In 20 years, it's worth about $20, in 50 years, about $90, etc. And you can buy and sell it at pretty much those prices and realize the interest that is due to you, even though the bond issuer pays no interest at all.
While it's true that healthcare costs go up somewhat with age, they go up excessively in the US:
https://blogs-images.forbes.co...
That is, the data shows that the problems with costs in the US healthcare system are in large part due to excessive spending on the elderly. And that's because there is currently no political will to limit this spending: doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies make a financial killing from this population for no substantive gains in life expectancy or quality of life.
Forcing young people to pay for the healthcare of old people doesn't "drive down" any costs and doesn't make healthcare "more efficient", it simply subsidizes the excessive consumption of health care by older people through imposing regressive taxes on poorer young people. It's morally wrong. In fact, I'd call it obscene. And it's politically unworkable in the long run.
I stand by my statement: any healthcare reform needs to start by sharply cutting Medicare/Medicaid costs down to European levels (contrary to what you believe, it makes little difference whether we talk about European averages or just elderly populations). Only then does it make sense to talk about extending Medicare to everybody.
First, the situation of an individual not needing to work and everybody in a society not needing to work are completely different.
Second, no, I don't want unearned income, which is why I avoid rich fools, including VCs, and don't play the lottery.
^ This
I couldn't disagree more.
Government may well underestimate unemployment, but it is absurd to argue (and there is no evidence) that it would do so to hide the effects of automation on the labor market. Furthermore, since automation has replaced the vast majority of jobs over the past century, the effect would be big.
In any case, you're basically saying that you just know that automation destroys jobs irreplaceably, even though you don't have any evidence, and even though it contradicts the data we have. That's not much of an argument on your part.
If that were due to automation, then U3 wouldn't have fallen to such low values in 2000 and 2008, when it was comparable to the average in the 1960's. And notice that U3 today is with a much larger labor force than in the 1960's.
That has nothing to do with automation, it has to do with baby boomers retiring, kids staying in school too long, and the welfare state encouraging both men and women to drop out of the workforce.
The big change since 1980 hasn't been automation, which has been going on gradually since the 19th century; the big change has been the massive rise in both legal and illegal immigration, from about 4.7% of the population to about 14% of the population. The vast majority of those immigrants are low skill, low education workers (with only a smaller population of high skill workers), and it is those people who have been displacing the US working class. Note that the absolute 10% increase in immigrants is about the size of the entire U3 unemployment rate.
It is cynical and hypocritical for Democrats and progressives to complain about how automation displaces blue collar workers, when they support vastly increasing the population of low skill workers in the US by importing them.
Well, you won't win elections that way in the US because the American middle class is greedy and entitled. It is, however, the traditional attitude of people in German and Scandinavian culture, which is why their welfare state differs so radically from ours.
If you want to know more, read some basic economics.
Well, and whether it is or is not is something best decided by each individual; redistributing money via government, on the other hand, massively reduces investments and massively subsidizes consumption.
Yeah, and the fact that you think that ought to be "the goal" makes you an utterly deplorable human being. And while you are free to jump off the cliff yourself that way, don't force the rest of us to jump with you.
I'm all for that.
If you jail people who hire illegal immigrants, you don't have to provide protections, since then illegal immigrants can't work anymore in the US.
You live in an economic fantasy land.
From the point of view of someone living 300 years ago, we already live in "post labor territory": all the needs an average person could possibly want fulfilled 300 years ago are fulfilled today on no work at all. But today, people aren't satisfied with what would have been a royal standard of living back then.
And 300 years from now, people will want their personal matter synthesizers, their rejuvenated clone bodies, their megawatt home power stations, and their personal spacecraft. And that will still require massive amounts of labor to invent, create, and supply.
Yet, our U3 unemployment rate is actually lower than it was at the beginning of the 1980's: http://tinyurl.com/lz9qfas
Our labor force participation rate is comparable to 1980: http://tinyurl.com/n4txkor
In fact, the biggest population dropping out of the labor force is (1) retiring baby boomers, and (2) young workers aged 16-25: http://tinyurl.com/jhrrhoz That's mainly the result of misguided economic policies keeping kids in school/college longer than it makes sense.
So, your analysis is strongly contradicted by facts. Automation clearly causes some jobs to go away, but they are obviously replaced by new jobs.
True. But if we design our economy around what's good in the short run, we end up with with what we are seeing: stagnant incomes and rising debt. Pretty much the most fundamental rule of economics and life is that if you want success in the long term, you need to endure hardships in the short term.
Don't bet on it. It's usually familiarity that breeds the greatest contempt.
Let's look at some of your statements:
That cheap labor is largely supplied by illegal immigration. Meaning, if you don't want so much cheap labor and more automation, just deport illegal immigrants.
Correct. However, since that's above median family income, it means that more than half of families (let alone Americans) will fall below it.
If you set the minimum wage to $30 and then redistribute income via a UBI, the effect will be (roughly) that everybody will be living at about a $15/h wage, with only half the people working.
Take a potato. You can consume it, or you can cut it up and plant it. If you do the latter, you'll have several potatoes a year later. It's the same with money: if you consume it right now, you end up with less a year from now than if you plant it. Deferring consumption and investing the potato gives you more down the road.
It's the same with money. Redistributing money to increase consumption does not help the economy in the long run, it just creates a short term "stimulus". For long term growth, you need less consumption and more investment.
The definition of "unemployment" is useful for short-term planning, not analyzing long term trends.
The number you actually want to look at is labor force participation rate; that dropped sharply under Obama, in part due to demographics, in part due to Obama's economic policies.
There is not a shred of evidence that automation causes unemployment.
There is plenty of evidence that automation improves living standards and wealth for everybody.
The unpalatable compiling to the unspeakable.
The US has two systems: public and private. Medicare/Medicaid are fully government run health insurance systems: the government collects the money, negotiates services, and pays out claims. It's places like Germany and Switzerland that have all-private systems with regulation, so the US actually already has a "more socialist" and more government run system than those countries. The difference is that countries like Germany and Switzerland do a better job at regulating their private systems than the US does at running its public systems.
First of all, given that they are using statistical confidence, just by chance, you expect one in 20 variables to improve accidentally. Second, if you transfer large amounts of money from a population you don't measure to a population you do measure, of course, the financial well being of the population you measure is going to improve. So, that reasoning is b.s. And, regardless, it is trying to distract from the fundamental fact that the Oregon experiment failed to deliver the outcomes that expansion of public coverage was first and foremost supposed to deliver: better physical health outcomes.
Absolutely false. Veterans cared for through the VA cost even more per year on average than people covered in other ways. (The reason this gets obscured and people cite absurdly low per person figures for VA patients is because the VA only pays for about 1/3 of the medical costs of veterans; the rest is reimbursed by other carriers.)
Correct. And single payer proposals do nothing to address this. Instead, what they propose is to simply extract even more money from American taxpayers and put it into the same broken system.
Now, from your your links:
Actually, the US devotes a fairly average share of its economy to social services.
https://ftalphaville.ft.com/20...
But that is the wrong measure anyway; social services shouldn't be measured relative to the economy. The correct measure is the absolute amount per capita the US spends on social services, and that is near the top.
https://mises.org/blog/social-...
Correct. And that tells you that increased health care spending and coverage does not improve life expectancy or an increase in health. Much of US health care spending is the consequence of obesity, substance abuse, single parenthood, homelessness, and promiscuity, and increased healthcare is not effective in addressing any of those problems. In fact, we have natural experiments in the US: Asian Americans and Latinos have the highest life expectancies in th
Correct. And this group claims that opposing DRM is a question of "ethics". How is it a question of "ethics"? How do their actions and demands relate to specific, identifiable ethical principles? The message they are delivering is “You Don’t Own Our Voices”. How does incorporating DRM into commercial products or into W3C standards translate into anybody "owning their voices"?
Absolutely not. I think there is nothing unethical about the W3C writing down a standard for DRM, nor is there anything unethical about Microsoft or Google using DRM. I simply think DRM is undesirable and I would prefer for the W3C not to standardize it, based on utilitarian arguments, not ethical arguments. It's similar to my stance on drug use: using drugs is undesirable, not unethical, and people who try to frame drug use in term of ethics are "spin doctors" and closet-totalitarian pricks.
In what way "does it work"? The US government-run system spends nearly three times as much per patient as European systems. Medicaid expansion was not beneficial to patient health compared to remaining uninsured. And the publicly run VA system is a disaster.
I have been insured through several employers and US private insurance companies, and they were uniformly better than any insurance I have had in Europe: they covered more, offered more options, appointments were quicker, facilities were a lot nicer.
Whether insurance is public or private, and whether it's tied to employment are two entirely unrelated issues. What the US needs is portable private insurance.
European systems are almost all two-tiered systems in which most people get limited, low-cost services, and high income earners either get some form of private insurance or pay out of pocket in the private market. The "public" systems are strictly cost-controlled, limiting what kinds of drugs and treatments you can get, paying staff poorly, keeping facilities plain, and often having long waiting times for anything other than emergency procedures.
Why doesn't that work in the US? Because any politician that attempts to cut back per-patient spending to European levels ($3000-4000/patient/year) in the US public system would get lynched by the medical lobby, the pharmaceutical lobby, and the powerful voting bloc of older voters.
Yes: crooks go where the money is.