Indeed, not only that, but the form of the post office isn't specified either. The "post office" could be one postmaster general whose job is to liaise with Amazon about delivery and stuff.
Even easier (technologically), you could enter the year/brand/style/size of clothes you already own that fit well and the computer should be able to identify your profile and find similarly sized stuff.
you just take your hands off the wheel and your foot off the brakes?
That's the great arrogance of "stoppers" right there. You think you have your hands on the wheel and your foot on the brakes and the entire world is your responsibility. Don't you realize there are billions of people in this world and most of them are pretty much going to do what they want? You going to go around shooting people who use oil? That sounds possible in the ultra afraid USA, where you can trick politicians into passing laws because we have to think of the children.. go try halting economic growth in China and see what happens.
I'm curious as to why people heap abuse on environmentalists. It seems like if you dare to admit you're trying to make a positive change and don't succeed, you are labeled an asshole. Meanwhile, industries that willfully externalize their costs in the form of carbon or whatever, they get a free pass because "they're not a charity."
Hmm because they rely on legislation instead of competition to force us to accept inferior goods and services.
The point about externalized costs doesn't make sense. If Exxon is externalizing its costs, then I am already paying my share because I'm external to Exxon. Turns out it's a reeeeeally reeeeeally small cost to me. Like too small to measure. Environmentalists tell me that one day it'll be a huge cost even though it's too small to measure right now. They want to sell me an anti-tiger stick to keep the future huge cost away. As long as we do what they say, even if it costs much more, it's way better than the imaginary super high costs that they saved us from!
One of the main drivers of increased cost is malpractice liability
Last time I saw some attempt at hard numbers, all malpractice related stuff (insurance, cost lawsuits, penalties and punishments, etc) only accounted for a tiny part of health care spending. There are some specialties where malpractice related costs play a bigger role but *overall* it's not significant.
neither obamacare nor socialism do anything to address that
Obamacare is garbage because it does nothing to address the cost of health care, but other countries (including countries that are more socialist than the US) pay less than us for health care, so I don't know about that. I think there are capitalist-based approaches that would be even better though.
Nobody is arguing against physics but the physics is only loosely related to "calorie counting."
Calorie counting means you look at the food label and add up how many calories you ate. Then you go to the gym and the machines tell you how many calories you burned. Then you look at a chart on the internet for your age and weight and body type and daily activity level and it tells you how many calories you burned just existing.
The reality is your diet has consequences for how you absorb energy from food, how you store energy in your body, and how you turn those energy stores back into energy to do work. If you're on a low carb diet and you're in ketosis and you "burn 1000 calories" on the treadmill, how many calories of steak do you have to eat to prevent yourself from losing weight? 1000? Nope, the chances of that being enough are incredibly low because digesting that steak and converting the fat and protein into energy is inefficient, plus in physics terms you burned more than 1000 calories on that jog because you breathed and sweated out a bunch of ketones that people on a high carb diet wouldn't have.
If you had a device that accurately measured your internal energy stores and your energy output, then calorie counting would work, but we don't. (We do have the scale which measures the net change, but again that's not calorie counting.)
I generally prefer Barnes and Noble to Borders, but in the town I lived in a few years ago there was only a Borders and it was a fine bookstore.
Both companies really popularized the idea of a large bookstore with popular books, lots of open space, chairs, and a cafe. They didn't at all mind if you bought a drink and read an entire book. It was like a library with enough copies of popular books to go around plus a built-in coffee shop. Who doesn't like that? And contrary to popular belief (e.g. the movie You've Got Mail), I have always found employees at these big stores to be knowledgeable about books (umm, not the high schoolers staffing the cafe area, but the floor employees). There's usually a shelf dedicated to staff picks and I've found some really interesting books by perusing that.
I don't know why public libraries don't invite coffee houses to set up shop in the same building for a rental fee. They're always complaining about not having enough money and *readers* would really enjoy it I think. Well, I take that back, I do know -- unfortunately most of the public libraries have decided to turn into free internet cafes for poor people. To save money, some of the public libraries in my area have moved into strip malls and drastically reduced their sizes.. now they're over 50% (by floor area) computer lab full of loud kids doing "homework" (playing online games) and homeless people looking at porn, probably 40% kids books, and 10% books that nobody is interested in because all the popular books (old and new) are checked out and wait-listed.
If you're talking about health insurance, there's no way there's a 50% overhead due to paperwork. That sounds closer to the negotiated price discount for insurance companies, which is not overhead. And that's the reason they can cut your bill in half if you don't have insurance -- even cutting it in half they're going to make more money off you than if you got the preferred price that insurance companies pay. When I look at my insurance statement, stuff like lab work is discounted 90%. Cutting your bill in half would mean they still charge you 5 times what the insurance company would pay for the exact same work.
The USPS doesn't pay property tax, sales tax, or federal income tax. They also get special loans directly from the Treasury. That's all taxpayer funding.
Then there are the special laws the protect the USPS, like the monopoly on letter carrying and the their immunity from parking tickets. If you don't count those laws as "funding" they at least qualify as government support.
Were most people in Scandinavia Vikings back then? I thought it was a pretty small subset of the population. Anyway they never gained enough wealth from looting to become rich, even back then -- which is why they were doing the looting, not the other way around. Looting is a poor man's occupation for the most part, unless it's the brief looting done during war.
The end of the Viking age occurred when the people they were raiding eclipsed them militarily and economically, plus the Vikings "found religion". I suspect that coming into the fold of Christianity, establishing normal trade, getting investment and wealth from the Church, etc, ended up generating a lot more long-term wealth than their raiding had done. Nothing is left of the Vikings except maybe some old jewelry or swords in a museum, maybe some boats that are preserved. The non-Viking fishermen and farmers who lived and worked built towns that are still around to this day with a functioning economy. That's lasting wealth in my opinion.
Ah, you think that has nothing to do with being exploited and robbed bare for centuries?
What correlation do you see between being "exploited and robbed bare" and modern success? Why do some countries get out of it and move on, and other countries wallow in it? I mean clearly that happens, and clearly there's more than one reason, so I don't see why you would focus on some historical period of oppression.
Conversely, this history of looting and pillaging is a large factor in why the currently wealthy countries became, well, wealthy.
How are the Vikings doing today, compared to the cultures they looted and pillaged? Is there still a Viking homeland? How are the Mongols doing? One does not simply loot and pillage as the basis for an economy.
The only way to get wealthy is sweat equity in your country. You build nice shit. You make successful companies. You have brilliant ideas. That's how most of the currently wealthy countries became wealthy, not looting and pillaging! For example, what did America loot and pillage? If it was so trivial for America to become wealthy by looting and pillaging the Native Americans, why didn't the Native Americans loot and pillage each other first and end up with the same wealth?
I strongly suspect that you're calling things looting and pillaging that are not in fact looting and pillaging, but hard work, brilliance, and to some extent luck.
I'm sure you're familiar with the tax treatment of loans with below-market interest rates. In the US it's treated the same as receiving cash (income). http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/7872
Giving them loans at an "attractive" interest rate (a rate that literally nobody else in world will offer them because of their horrible repayment history and future outlook) is most definitely "funding."
We LET them have financing for power plants which is what the story is about.
My reading of "Letting them do it today" was more like "Letting them continue to use US foreign aid money to build coal power plants", not the white man's burden thing you latched onto.
Comparing Medicare efficiency to private insurance is fallacious for two reasons.
1. Medicare's customers have much higher than average health care costs, which serves to make them look more efficient without actually making them more efficient in the traditional sense. What I mean is, processing the claim for a prescription drug that costs $350/month and is taken throughout the year is about the same amount of work as processing a claim for a prescription drug for a seasonal allergy that costs $50/month that you take in the spring... but you look like 28 times more efficient handling the first one. Obviously not a "true" efficiency gain though.
2. Medicare doesn't exist in a vacuum. When Medicare cuts payments, doctors and hospitals raise their prices to other insurance groups to maintain their profits. In OUR society, where a new doctor might have $500k in debt after spending 8+ years in school, eliminating the subsidy that private insurance provides to Medicare (i.e. making Medicare our single-payer system for everyone) could very well wreak havoc.
Health care is too expensive in this country but I think there are more step-by-step approaches to fixing it than a massive change like that. For instance an *easy* change would be getting rid of the undergrad degree requirement for doctors. Most countries don't have it.. you get your equivalent undergrad education as part of medical school, and it's much narrower and given less importance. Save 4 years of undergrad and add 1 year of medical school. That's letting doctors cut off 3 years from when they'll start earning big money and paying off debts, which would have a noticeable effect on what they have to charge.
I mean that's a small example, but one that is obvious, has precedent, moves the spending needle in the correct direction, and doesn't require some huge new government bureaucracy to implement. There are so many examples of that it's ridiculous.
The business model of American insurance companies (as if they all have the same model anyway) has little to do with the cost of health care. The high cost of health care in this country is due to an almost total lack of regulation over health care prices.
As an example, if there are price controls for drugs, the cost of drugs will come down, whether there's an evil capitalist insurance company involved or not.
Doesn't the fact that people are different and assign different values to the same things prevent the free market destructive spiral you're talking about?
For any given consumer, the cost of insurance is only one factor in selecting which insurance product to buy. An insurance company that had higher prices but offered better service and wouldn't kick off people who get sick would still have customers because some people value that assurance more than the difference in prices. Someone will be their customer just because they like the name better.
Not sure what point this borderline smartassery is trying to make. Is there any evidence that the dead girl behaved in a way that would have justified their behaviour towards her?
I was trying to show you that the "harsh justice" approach taken with young teenage and preteen girls sounds crazy, just like the anonymous coward pointed out to you and which you disputed. Obviously it didn't work since you followed up with "Perhaps the dead girl really *did* do something that warranted that behaviour..."
make her come across as utterly worthless, sociopathic vermin that deserves everything she was happy to dole out to others
You really sound crazy calling young girls "useless vermin." I don't think you understand society. I suspect you have absolutely no clue why there's a separate juvenile justice system for instance and why it's a big deal when a minor is tried as an adult.
GP is totally right. You can't control other people's children. You're not gonna get the bullies locked away in jail until AFTER your kid commits suicide, if ever. So don't bother fantasizing about that. All you can do is be involved with your own children and know what's going on.
Being "exactly like this girl" would involve picking on some arbitrary innocent person and bullying them into killing themselves.
Well you are suggesting that people harass a 12 year old girl and a 14 year old girl until they kill themselves.
Oh, because they did something bad?
When do we put the dead girl on trial so that we can determine whether these girls did a service to the world in getting her to kill herself, like you're suggesting? Because you'd agree with that I'm sure... if the girl deserved it, then the bullying was justice
1. It's a cowards way out that rewards the tormentors
I was just thinking about that. With it being more and more common to "bust" bullies and actually send them to jail, that dynamic might change. Committing suicide may become a true act of revenge against the bully, which will of course encourage people to commit suicide.
and the graph has no referents and no way to know what its numbers mean
I suggest you look again. The graph has labeled and marked axes and a title. If you still can't tell what the numbers mean, let me explain. Perhaps I have the benefit of more experience with math, graphs, and economic data in general so it was easier for me to understand.
Every year the government collects statistics on the population, including income by household, by family, by age, by education level, by race, by gender, etc. They compile that data into descriptive statistics that you often hear about in the news ("gender pay gap", etc). They put the data into graphs, with time on one axis and income on another, so that you can quickly see trends.
One problem with looking at income over time is the tendency for the cost of living to change from year to year. If income goes up one year, but prices go up even more, then we usually want to know that people got "poorer" even though their income went up. To account for that, economists will adjust each year's data based on the level of inflation that year. They establish a base year against which the other years are measured. In my graph the base year was 1994, which is why the vertical axis is labeled "1994 Dollars" -- that means they adjusted each year's income to express the purchasing power as if it were 1994. $1 in 1973 might have bought the same goods that $2 bought in 1994 (as an example), so they treat a $15000 income in 1974 as if it were $30000 in "1994 dollars".
The graph showed nothing at all. It was meaningless, it had no context. This graph [wikipedia.org] looks nothing like yours.
They look nothing alike because they are nothing alike. Mine covered 1973 to 1994, yours 1991 to 2010. Mine was inflation adjusted (to 1994) median family income, yours was inflation adjusted (to 2010) personal income by educational attainment. Again, I suggest you look closer at the graphs. There is a wealth of contextual information (if you know what to look for) which goes a long way in explaining the meaning of both graphs and how they should (or should not) be compared to each other.
I'd charge both the tax, but if you earn a profit by downsizing, why should you NOT pay income on those earnings? Personally, if I had my way the CGT would be done completely away with and that profit taxed as income.
I'm not here to debate what should be done. We're talking about your assertion that Reagan was bad for everybody but the rich. I've shown you now that Reagan was good for the median income worker, and that his tax reforms helped the middle class, with an emphasis on retirees.
No, it doesn't. I wish I could pay the capital gains tax on my salary instead of the much higher income tax.
You can. Just start replacing your income with activities that generate capital gains. It's not a big mystery. For instance put in a ton of "sweat equity" in your house and then sell it for a huge profit. That's capital gains right there. Up to a certain amount you won't even pay the capital gains rate because there's a nice exclusion (tax loop hole).
There is absolutely no rational reason I've ever heard why that corporate job-killing pirate Romney should pay less than half the rate I'm paying, when I earn a fraction of what he does.
There are many good reasons that are perfectly rational, but you don't want to hear them.
Here's one for example. Say you buy your house and live in it for 20 years. In the meantime, due to inflation, the "price" of your house has doubled. Now remember what I said about inflation -- the "value" of your house is the same (say it was worth 100,000 Big Macs back in 1993, and today in 2013 it's still worth 100,000 Big Macs, but the dollar price of Big Macs has gone up).
There are no referents in that graphic. Link the wikipedia article itself.
I'm not interested in the article, I only wanted to show the graph so I did an image search and found it. I don't know what article it's from but I know it's accurate because I've seen it before. If you don't believe me and need extra context, here is another document which contains virtually the same graph: http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa261.pdf (page 6)
I explained that in my comment. Are you trolling? I'm a bit naive about that sometimes.
I don't understand why you think I was trolling. Maybe I'm naive about that as well.
Again, your graphic is meaningless, it has no context or referents.
I'm not sure why you're referring to the graphic again, I explained in text why cutting the capital gains tax, especially in light of tax law before 1997, was positive for the middle class.
As it should be. Gains taxes were already lower than income taxes, if I make a profit by downsizing my house I should pay taxes on that profit, especially if I'm upsizing.
If you're downsizing your house, you can't also be upsizing, so I'm not sure what you were trying to say. Perhaps you misunderstood what I meant.
Before 1997, if you sold your house and bought a smaller house, you had to pay capital gains tax on the sale. If you sold your house and bought a bigger house, you did not have to pay capital gains tax.
For middle class retirees, it's pretty common to sell your house and move into a smaller house (downsize). So cutting the capital gains tax helped them.
My point was that capital gains doesn't just affect the rich. The middle class has plenty of capital as well, especially as they near retirement. Did cutting capital gains help the poor? No. The poor aren't everything though.
Iran Contra scandal [wikipedia.org], and general support for the violent overthrow of South American democracies by US-supported right wing dictators;
The Arab Spring has shown us that US-supported right wing dictators are often the better alternative. I don't know nearly as much about South America during that time as I know about the Middle East, so who knows. Perhaps you have a point here.
Promulgation of the fabricated racist mythology of the "welfare queen" in political discourse
The common man is not a welfare queen and does not support welfare queens. I don't think Reagan's frank discussion of welfare abuse was bad for the common man.
And it led to one of Bill Clinton's signature achievements -- welfare reform -- for which he is widely praised today by the left and the right. (Though to be honest my gut tells me the left does not like it and merely uses it as evidence that Democrats can be fiscally conservative at times, and they get more out of pretending to like it than attacking their own guy over something that is already done with.)
Deep cuts to federal programs in early childhood education and mental care for veterans, with demographic impacts persisting decades later.
Is it great? No. Did it have much impact on the common man? Not in my opinion. Sounds like it affected the poor, and a subset of them at that. Any cuts to federal programs have the silver lining of reducing federal debt as well, which directly helps the common man.
Increasing economic inequality, disenfranchising the middle class as an economic force
Actually there was strong growth in median household income adjusted for inflation during Reagan's tenure. The middle class improved in economic terms.
Financial deregulation leading to the Savings and Loan crisis [wikipedia.org]
The first listed cause on that page was Reagan's tax reform bill. Reading a bit more about that reveals it did play a pretty large role, probably larger than the deregulation you're talking about: "Reagan's "elimination of loopholes" in the tax code included the elimination of the "passive loss" provisions that subsidized rental housing. Because this was removed retroactively, it bankrupted many real estate developments which used this tax break as a premise, which in turn bankrupted 747 Savings and Loans, many of whom were operating more or less as banks, thus requiring the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to cover their debts and losses with tax payer money."
Do you really consider that to be bad though? Closing tax loop holes that investors were taking advantage of? I'd say the primary cause of the S&L crisis was the existence of those tax loopholes that were incentivizing investors to buy flawed investments and rent them out cheaply and then profiting from the tax loss. The tax-loss "value" of bad investments outweighed the investment itself. That doesn't make sense.
I suppose if Reagan hadn't done it retroactively, it would have been better (more stable), but that's a pretty fine distinction! Certainly I think Reagan's intentions were admirable. And it sounds like Reagan held these investors more accountable for their bad decisions than either Bush or Obama in OUR financial crisis. Props to him for that in my opinion.
Department of Housing and Urban Development grant rigging to fraudulently award lucrative contracts to campaign contributors and lobbyists
Based on what you've said, while Reagan was not perfect (and I never thought he was) I don't think you've shown anything that had a major negative impact on the common man. While you listed some negatives (and some that, in my opinion, were either wrong or positive), you haven't even started to address t
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Indeed, not only that, but the form of the post office isn't specified either. The "post office" could be one postmaster general whose job is to liaise with Amazon about delivery and stuff.
Even easier (technologically), you could enter the year/brand/style/size of clothes you already own that fit well and the computer should be able to identify your profile and find similarly sized stuff.
you just take your hands off the wheel and your foot off the brakes?
That's the great arrogance of "stoppers" right there. You think you have your hands on the wheel and your foot on the brakes and the entire world is your responsibility. Don't you realize there are billions of people in this world and most of them are pretty much going to do what they want? You going to go around shooting people who use oil? That sounds possible in the ultra afraid USA, where you can trick politicians into passing laws because we have to think of the children.. go try halting economic growth in China and see what happens.
I'm curious as to why people heap abuse on environmentalists. It seems like if you dare to admit you're trying to make a positive change and don't succeed, you are labeled an asshole. Meanwhile, industries that willfully externalize their costs in the form of carbon or whatever, they get a free pass because "they're not a charity."
Hmm because they rely on legislation instead of competition to force us to accept inferior goods and services.
The point about externalized costs doesn't make sense. If Exxon is externalizing its costs, then I am already paying my share because I'm external to Exxon. Turns out it's a reeeeeally reeeeeally small cost to me. Like too small to measure. Environmentalists tell me that one day it'll be a huge cost even though it's too small to measure right now. They want to sell me an anti-tiger stick to keep the future huge cost away. As long as we do what they say, even if it costs much more, it's way better than the imaginary super high costs that they saved us from!
You've got an internet connection. Who have you been raping?
One of the main drivers of increased cost is malpractice liability
Last time I saw some attempt at hard numbers, all malpractice related stuff (insurance, cost lawsuits, penalties and punishments, etc) only accounted for a tiny part of health care spending. There are some specialties where malpractice related costs play a bigger role but *overall* it's not significant.
neither obamacare nor socialism do anything to address that
Obamacare is garbage because it does nothing to address the cost of health care, but other countries (including countries that are more socialist than the US) pay less than us for health care, so I don't know about that. I think there are capitalist-based approaches that would be even better though.
Nobody is arguing against physics but the physics is only loosely related to "calorie counting."
Calorie counting means you look at the food label and add up how many calories you ate. Then you go to the gym and the machines tell you how many calories you burned. Then you look at a chart on the internet for your age and weight and body type and daily activity level and it tells you how many calories you burned just existing.
The reality is your diet has consequences for how you absorb energy from food, how you store energy in your body, and how you turn those energy stores back into energy to do work. If you're on a low carb diet and you're in ketosis and you "burn 1000 calories" on the treadmill, how many calories of steak do you have to eat to prevent yourself from losing weight? 1000? Nope, the chances of that being enough are incredibly low because digesting that steak and converting the fat and protein into energy is inefficient, plus in physics terms you burned more than 1000 calories on that jog because you breathed and sweated out a bunch of ketones that people on a high carb diet wouldn't have.
If you had a device that accurately measured your internal energy stores and your energy output, then calorie counting would work, but we don't. (We do have the scale which measures the net change, but again that's not calorie counting.)
I generally prefer Barnes and Noble to Borders, but in the town I lived in a few years ago there was only a Borders and it was a fine bookstore.
Both companies really popularized the idea of a large bookstore with popular books, lots of open space, chairs, and a cafe. They didn't at all mind if you bought a drink and read an entire book. It was like a library with enough copies of popular books to go around plus a built-in coffee shop. Who doesn't like that? And contrary to popular belief (e.g. the movie You've Got Mail), I have always found employees at these big stores to be knowledgeable about books (umm, not the high schoolers staffing the cafe area, but the floor employees). There's usually a shelf dedicated to staff picks and I've found some really interesting books by perusing that.
I don't know why public libraries don't invite coffee houses to set up shop in the same building for a rental fee. They're always complaining about not having enough money and *readers* would really enjoy it I think. Well, I take that back, I do know -- unfortunately most of the public libraries have decided to turn into free internet cafes for poor people. To save money, some of the public libraries in my area have moved into strip malls and drastically reduced their sizes.. now they're over 50% (by floor area) computer lab full of loud kids doing "homework" (playing online games) and homeless people looking at porn, probably 40% kids books, and 10% books that nobody is interested in because all the popular books (old and new) are checked out and wait-listed.
If you're talking about health insurance, there's no way there's a 50% overhead due to paperwork. That sounds closer to the negotiated price discount for insurance companies, which is not overhead. And that's the reason they can cut your bill in half if you don't have insurance -- even cutting it in half they're going to make more money off you than if you got the preferred price that insurance companies pay. When I look at my insurance statement, stuff like lab work is discounted 90%. Cutting your bill in half would mean they still charge you 5 times what the insurance company would pay for the exact same work.
The USPS doesn't pay property tax, sales tax, or federal income tax. They also get special loans directly from the Treasury. That's all taxpayer funding.
Then there are the special laws the protect the USPS, like the monopoly on letter carrying and the their immunity from parking tickets. If you don't count those laws as "funding" they at least qualify as government support.
Were most people in Scandinavia Vikings back then? I thought it was a pretty small subset of the population. Anyway they never gained enough wealth from looting to become rich, even back then -- which is why they were doing the looting, not the other way around. Looting is a poor man's occupation for the most part, unless it's the brief looting done during war.
The end of the Viking age occurred when the people they were raiding eclipsed them militarily and economically, plus the Vikings "found religion". I suspect that coming into the fold of Christianity, establishing normal trade, getting investment and wealth from the Church, etc, ended up generating a lot more long-term wealth than their raiding had done. Nothing is left of the Vikings except maybe some old jewelry or swords in a museum, maybe some boats that are preserved. The non-Viking fishermen and farmers who lived and worked built towns that are still around to this day with a functioning economy. That's lasting wealth in my opinion.
Ah, you think that has nothing to do with being exploited and robbed bare for centuries?
What correlation do you see between being "exploited and robbed bare" and modern success? Why do some countries get out of it and move on, and other countries wallow in it? I mean clearly that happens, and clearly there's more than one reason, so I don't see why you would focus on some historical period of oppression.
Conversely, this history of looting and pillaging is a large factor in why the currently wealthy countries became, well, wealthy.
How are the Vikings doing today, compared to the cultures they looted and pillaged? Is there still a Viking homeland? How are the Mongols doing? One does not simply loot and pillage as the basis for an economy.
The only way to get wealthy is sweat equity in your country. You build nice shit. You make successful companies. You have brilliant ideas. That's how most of the currently wealthy countries became wealthy, not looting and pillaging! For example, what did America loot and pillage? If it was so trivial for America to become wealthy by looting and pillaging the Native Americans, why didn't the Native Americans loot and pillage each other first and end up with the same wealth?
I strongly suspect that you're calling things looting and pillaging that are not in fact looting and pillaging, but hard work, brilliance, and to some extent luck.
I'm sure you're familiar with the tax treatment of loans with below-market interest rates. In the US it's treated the same as receiving cash (income). http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/7872
Giving them loans at an "attractive" interest rate (a rate that literally nobody else in world will offer them because of their horrible repayment history and future outlook) is most definitely "funding."
We don't LET them do anything.
We LET them have financing for power plants which is what the story is about.
My reading of "Letting them do it today" was more like "Letting them continue to use US foreign aid money to build coal power plants", not the white man's burden thing you latched onto.
Comparing Medicare efficiency to private insurance is fallacious for two reasons.
1. Medicare's customers have much higher than average health care costs, which serves to make them look more efficient without actually making them more efficient in the traditional sense. What I mean is, processing the claim for a prescription drug that costs $350/month and is taken throughout the year is about the same amount of work as processing a claim for a prescription drug for a seasonal allergy that costs $50/month that you take in the spring... but you look like 28 times more efficient handling the first one. Obviously not a "true" efficiency gain though.
2. Medicare doesn't exist in a vacuum. When Medicare cuts payments, doctors and hospitals raise their prices to other insurance groups to maintain their profits. In OUR society, where a new doctor might have $500k in debt after spending 8+ years in school, eliminating the subsidy that private insurance provides to Medicare (i.e. making Medicare our single-payer system for everyone) could very well wreak havoc.
Health care is too expensive in this country but I think there are more step-by-step approaches to fixing it than a massive change like that. For instance an *easy* change would be getting rid of the undergrad degree requirement for doctors. Most countries don't have it.. you get your equivalent undergrad education as part of medical school, and it's much narrower and given less importance. Save 4 years of undergrad and add 1 year of medical school. That's letting doctors cut off 3 years from when they'll start earning big money and paying off debts, which would have a noticeable effect on what they have to charge.
I mean that's a small example, but one that is obvious, has precedent, moves the spending needle in the correct direction, and doesn't require some huge new government bureaucracy to implement. There are so many examples of that it's ridiculous.
The business model of American insurance companies (as if they all have the same model anyway) has little to do with the cost of health care. The high cost of health care in this country is due to an almost total lack of regulation over health care prices.
As an example, if there are price controls for drugs, the cost of drugs will come down, whether there's an evil capitalist insurance company involved or not.
Doesn't the fact that people are different and assign different values to the same things prevent the free market destructive spiral you're talking about?
For any given consumer, the cost of insurance is only one factor in selecting which insurance product to buy. An insurance company that had higher prices but offered better service and wouldn't kick off people who get sick would still have customers because some people value that assurance more than the difference in prices. Someone will be their customer just because they like the name better.
Not sure what point this borderline smartassery is trying to make. Is there any evidence that the dead girl behaved in a way that would have justified their behaviour towards her?
I was trying to show you that the "harsh justice" approach taken with young teenage and preteen girls sounds crazy, just like the anonymous coward pointed out to you and which you disputed. Obviously it didn't work since you followed up with "Perhaps the dead girl really *did* do something that warranted that behaviour..."
make her come across as utterly worthless, sociopathic vermin that deserves everything she was happy to dole out to others
You really sound crazy calling young girls "useless vermin." I don't think you understand society. I suspect you have absolutely no clue why there's a separate juvenile justice system for instance and why it's a big deal when a minor is tried as an adult.
Don't you mean that if you're a messed up person, it's not YOUR fault, it's the kids who tease you?
GP is totally right. You can't control other people's children. You're not gonna get the bullies locked away in jail until AFTER your kid commits suicide, if ever. So don't bother fantasizing about that. All you can do is be involved with your own children and know what's going on.
Being "exactly like this girl" would involve picking on some arbitrary innocent person and bullying them into killing themselves.
Well you are suggesting that people harass a 12 year old girl and a 14 year old girl until they kill themselves.
Oh, because they did something bad?
When do we put the dead girl on trial so that we can determine whether these girls did a service to the world in getting her to kill herself, like you're suggesting? Because you'd agree with that I'm sure... if the girl deserved it, then the bullying was justice
1. It's a cowards way out that rewards the tormentors
I was just thinking about that. With it being more and more common to "bust" bullies and actually send them to jail, that dynamic might change. Committing suicide may become a true act of revenge against the bully, which will of course encourage people to commit suicide.
Again, the Cato institute has no credibility
Yes they do.
and the graph has no referents and no way to know what its numbers mean
I suggest you look again. The graph has labeled and marked axes and a title. If you still can't tell what the numbers mean, let me explain. Perhaps I have the benefit of more experience with math, graphs, and economic data in general so it was easier for me to understand.
Every year the government collects statistics on the population, including income by household, by family, by age, by education level, by race, by gender, etc. They compile that data into descriptive statistics that you often hear about in the news ("gender pay gap", etc). They put the data into graphs, with time on one axis and income on another, so that you can quickly see trends.
One problem with looking at income over time is the tendency for the cost of living to change from year to year. If income goes up one year, but prices go up even more, then we usually want to know that people got "poorer" even though their income went up. To account for that, economists will adjust each year's data based on the level of inflation that year. They establish a base year against which the other years are measured. In my graph the base year was 1994, which is why the vertical axis is labeled "1994 Dollars" -- that means they adjusted each year's income to express the purchasing power as if it were 1994. $1 in 1973 might have bought the same goods that $2 bought in 1994 (as an example), so they treat a $15000 income in 1974 as if it were $30000 in "1994 dollars".
The graph showed nothing at all. It was meaningless, it had no context. This graph [wikipedia.org] looks nothing like yours.
They look nothing alike because they are nothing alike. Mine covered 1973 to 1994, yours 1991 to 2010. Mine was inflation adjusted (to 1994) median family income, yours was inflation adjusted (to 2010) personal income by educational attainment. Again, I suggest you look closer at the graphs. There is a wealth of contextual information (if you know what to look for) which goes a long way in explaining the meaning of both graphs and how they should (or should not) be compared to each other.
I'd charge both the tax, but if you earn a profit by downsizing, why should you NOT pay income on those earnings? Personally, if I had my way the CGT would be done completely away with and that profit taxed as income.
I'm not here to debate what should be done. We're talking about your assertion that Reagan was bad for everybody but the rich. I've shown you now that Reagan was good for the median income worker, and that his tax reforms helped the middle class, with an emphasis on retirees.
No, it doesn't. I wish I could pay the capital gains tax on my salary instead of the much higher income tax.
You can. Just start replacing your income with activities that generate capital gains. It's not a big mystery. For instance put in a ton of "sweat equity" in your house and then sell it for a huge profit. That's capital gains right there. Up to a certain amount you won't even pay the capital gains rate because there's a nice exclusion (tax loop hole).
There is absolutely no rational reason I've ever heard why that corporate job-killing pirate Romney should pay less than half the rate I'm paying, when I earn a fraction of what he does.
There are many good reasons that are perfectly rational, but you don't want to hear them.
Here's one for example. Say you buy your house and live in it for 20 years. In the meantime, due to inflation, the "price" of your house has doubled. Now remember what I said about inflation -- the "value" of your house is the same (say it was worth 100,000 Big Macs back in 1993, and today in 2013 it's still worth 100,000 Big Macs, but the dollar price of Big Macs has gone up).
So when you sell your hou
There are no referents in that graphic. Link the wikipedia article itself.
I'm not interested in the article, I only wanted to show the graph so I did an image search and found it. I don't know what article it's from but I know it's accurate because I've seen it before. If you don't believe me and need extra context, here is another document which contains virtually the same graph: http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa261.pdf (page 6)
I explained that in my comment. Are you trolling? I'm a bit naive about that sometimes.
I don't understand why you think I was trolling. Maybe I'm naive about that as well.
Again, your graphic is meaningless, it has no context or referents.
I'm not sure why you're referring to the graphic again, I explained in text why cutting the capital gains tax, especially in light of tax law before 1997, was positive for the middle class.
As it should be. Gains taxes were already lower than income taxes, if I make a profit by downsizing my house I should pay taxes on that profit, especially if I'm upsizing.
If you're downsizing your house, you can't also be upsizing, so I'm not sure what you were trying to say. Perhaps you misunderstood what I meant.
Before 1997, if you sold your house and bought a smaller house, you had to pay capital gains tax on the sale. If you sold your house and bought a bigger house, you did not have to pay capital gains tax.
For middle class retirees, it's pretty common to sell your house and move into a smaller house (downsize). So cutting the capital gains tax helped them.
My point was that capital gains doesn't just affect the rich. The middle class has plenty of capital as well, especially as they near retirement. Did cutting capital gains help the poor? No. The poor aren't everything though.
Iran Contra scandal [wikipedia.org], and general support for the violent overthrow of South American democracies by US-supported right wing dictators;
The Arab Spring has shown us that US-supported right wing dictators are often the better alternative. I don't know nearly as much about South America during that time as I know about the Middle East, so who knows. Perhaps you have a point here.
Promulgation of the fabricated racist mythology of the "welfare queen" in political discourse
The common man is not a welfare queen and does not support welfare queens. I don't think Reagan's frank discussion of welfare abuse was bad for the common man.
And it led to one of Bill Clinton's signature achievements -- welfare reform -- for which he is widely praised today by the left and the right. (Though to be honest my gut tells me the left does not like it and merely uses it as evidence that Democrats can be fiscally conservative at times, and they get more out of pretending to like it than attacking their own guy over something that is already done with.)
Deep cuts to federal programs in early childhood education and mental care for veterans, with demographic impacts persisting decades later.
Is it great? No. Did it have much impact on the common man? Not in my opinion. Sounds like it affected the poor, and a subset of them at that. Any cuts to federal programs have the silver lining of reducing federal debt as well, which directly helps the common man.
Increasing economic inequality, disenfranchising the middle class as an economic force
Actually there was strong growth in median household income adjusted for inflation during Reagan's tenure. The middle class improved in economic terms.
Financial deregulation leading to the Savings and Loan crisis [wikipedia.org]
The first listed cause on that page was Reagan's tax reform bill. Reading a bit more about that reveals it did play a pretty large role, probably larger than the deregulation you're talking about: "Reagan's "elimination of loopholes" in the tax code included the elimination of the "passive loss" provisions that subsidized rental housing. Because this was removed retroactively, it bankrupted many real estate developments which used this tax break as a premise, which in turn bankrupted 747 Savings and Loans, many of whom were operating more or less as banks, thus requiring the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to cover their debts and losses with tax payer money."
Do you really consider that to be bad though? Closing tax loop holes that investors were taking advantage of? I'd say the primary cause of the S&L crisis was the existence of those tax loopholes that were incentivizing investors to buy flawed investments and rent them out cheaply and then profiting from the tax loss. The tax-loss "value" of bad investments outweighed the investment itself. That doesn't make sense.
I suppose if Reagan hadn't done it retroactively, it would have been better (more stable), but that's a pretty fine distinction! Certainly I think Reagan's intentions were admirable. And it sounds like Reagan held these investors more accountable for their bad decisions than either Bush or Obama in OUR financial crisis. Props to him for that in my opinion.
Department of Housing and Urban Development grant rigging to fraudulently award lucrative contracts to campaign contributors and lobbyists
You're really stretching. We're talking peanuts now.
Based on what you've said, while Reagan was not perfect (and I never thought he was) I don't think you've shown anything that had a major negative impact on the common man. While you listed some negatives (and some that, in my opinion, were either wrong or positive), you haven't even started to address t