If the corporations are controlling the government, then the corporations that are in control of the government are actually the government. It's still the government that has the power.
It sucks precisely because the government is ineffective,
That's incorrect though. It sucks because the government has absolutely no limit to its power.
If you're in the ICU's jurisdiction, you would not be saying "Haha government is so weak here, you can ignore it if you want." You'd be executed for doing the most minor thing if it didn't fall in line with the ICU's orders, especially as a presumably Western non-Muslim guy (just guessing).
Sure it has a government, but under the same argument, so does Afghanistan
Yes, of course Afghanistan has government... I don't understand... in your mind, who is Afghan President Karzai (i.e. does he exist), and who do you think Karzai want to have peace talks with? Taliban Services LLC?
I'm sorry but I strongly object to your characterization of these forces as non-governmental. They are governmental because they are trying to govern the society. That's what a government does, it's what the word means. The government is literally that which governs the governed. If you're being governed by the laws of the ICU, or the Taliban, or the Nazis, or Jamaica or America, then that entity is your government whether you like it or not, whether history judges them kindly or not.
There are few places on earth that lack government. Somalia and Afghanistan are not among them. They are hotly contested areas with multiple competing governments, each of which are far stronger than the individual or family.
Nonetheless, "Reagan was bad for the common man" (domestically and internationally) is an objective historical fact supported by abundant evidence, like "Hitler was bad for the Jews."
Except that it's not at all like that.
What are these objective historical facts?
I know plenty of objective historical facts about why Hitler was bad for the Jews.
I know a handful of objective historical facts about why Reagan was GOOD for the "common man" (like rising median incomes during his term, increased fiscal stability for Social Security, etc), and none about why he was bad. So enlighten me, if you have actual facts to back that up that are as uncontroversial as Hitler vs. the Jews.
With this system, Mrs. G. could have labelled me red (40%) in some "character" category and that data would stay with me into seventh grade. So the seventh grade teacher could say "oh, little Sir Garlon is an insubordinate slacker, I'd better not waste my limited time on him -- I'll concentrate on the yellow students because I need to end the year with 50% green to get tenure."
I understand your concern but this specific example isn't very good. If the teacher just picks a number subjectively like you say Mrs. G did, then the 7th grade teacher would set everybody to green to get tenure.
It would be huge progress if teachers had goal posts to which they were held accountable in some way (tenure, pay, whatever), and I think that would outweigh the abuses you're talking about. Teachers can already screw your grades if they don't like you, especially in less objective classes where you write papers instead of answering math questions.
specifically for his idiotic (probably more like disingenuous) "trickle down theory"
Trickle-down economics is accurate. What problem do you have with it? Consult the graph I linked to above if you think Reagan didn't make everybody richer.
and passing legislation that slashed the capital gains tax.
Yeah, ooh, the evil tax cutter, hurting the middle class.
Did you know that before 1997 the capital gains on selling your house was much more limited and only applied if you used the proceeds to buy a *more expensive* house?
So cutting capital gains was a direct way of helping retirees who were selling their house and downsizing.
Last I checked, it's quite easy to move to Somalia.
So based on that I assume you consider the Islamic Courts Union -- the radical Islamic group that seeks to control Somalia -- to be a... corporation? Not a government (or aspiring government)?
Somalia does not suck because of corporations, it sucks because of its government(s). People like you think of Somalia as a governmental vacuum but that's just ignorant of the real situation.
They can however, prevent me from obtaining employment (and being self-employed is not always an option folks), obtaining credit (That's an awfully nice credit score you have there...be a shame if something...happened...to it.), track my every movement through various means, take me to court on bogus charges then drop them forcing me to miss days of work to defend myself (if I am already employed), or bill me for services they did not provide and force me to spend more time and money fighting them in court.
All of that stuff is much easier for the government, and far more likely to happen by the hand of the government.
You know what power a disgruntled phone representative from Some Big Corp Inc. has? None! What can they do, fraudulently sign you up for a service? Have you never disputed a charge with your credit company? It takes 30 seconds.
Unless you manage to seriously piss off the CEO of a Fortune 500 company none of the stuff you said could happen to you.
On the other hand, a corrupt cop, a building inspector who is having a bad day, a teacher or principal who doesn't like your child... they can all make your life pretty shitty. Not the Police Chief, not the Mayor, not the President... one little corrupt official.
THAT is the difference in power between government and corporations.
The people who made the promises are the ones who created the Ponzi scheme, the people who are getting SS benefits now are the victims of those lies.
In a broad sense they're not the victims of the lie until and unless SS is reformed in a way that has a net financial harm on them. In other words cutting their promised benefits does not make them victims if they're still getting more than they paid into the system.
And as for the promise.. from day 1 of SS, it was NOT a program that entitled you to or guaranteed a certain benefit, like a savings bond might be construed. It was billed as an insurance program that would help you in retirement. Well no matter how much they cut benefits, if they're still helping you, the promise is kept.
Like I said, if you want to give all the people who have paid into SS their money back with interest, then fine.
This is the best possible outcome for SS but sooooo unlikely to happen unfortunately.
You'd probably be up in arms if you had gone to K-Mart a year ago and put a nice new television on layaway, paying a little bit every month, only to be told "no TV for you, you leech upon society" when you made the last payment and expected to take the TV home. That's what you want to do to SS.
Strawman? Looking over the existing thread, and having personally engaged in many such discussions over the years, people who want to terminate or privatize SS are not saying "Thanks for all the money, now get lost." You are morally entitled to get back most or all that you paid plus interest and I think most people (even anti-SS people) have no problem agreeing with that. (I mean technically a lot of SS money has already been returned to the people since the government takes the SS money and spends it on projects that supposedly benefit us all.. so it's like if you loan someone $10000, then they spend $5000 of it paying for your college, and then you're like "give me back my $10k!")
There are many simple and intuitive ways to end SS, if still painfully either to retirees or youth (some split seems most appropriate), but less painful than it will be if we keep putting it off.
One thing we can do immediately to lay the groundwork is to relabel SS payments as welfare as soon as you get more money than you paid in (plus the interest your money earned in T-bills) so that people understand they did not EARN or PAY for their continued benefits. If the government gave every person a report of how much money they contributed, how much it has earned in investments, and how much has been withdrawn, people would suddenly see that the money isn't unlimited, nor was it stolen by the government or whatever (that's a common theme among people who don't understand the whole "invest in T-bills" thing. And if you have a negative balance, you're on welfare. Simple, and honest.
Just doing that would clear up a lot of misunderstanding about the fiscal nature of the program. I talk to idiots on the internet all the time who tell me they paid into the system and earned their benefits and I point out that the SS tax they paid for much of their career was less than half of the current rate which I've been paying since day 1 of my career. Which of us is REALLY paid in then?
Except that nothing else is effective at it - at least nothing that has yet been tried or proposed - in comparison to what a single payer system can do.
I don't know about that -- other countries that have single-payer systems ALSO have a host of other things that are making health care cheaper. It's demonstrable and makes perfect intuitive sense. One example is that in America you get an undergrad degree before going to medical school. In many countries, you don't -- there's a single extra year of medical school (at most) that replaces 4 years of undergrad. That's going to save doctors a lot of loans, plus get them earning faster, which means they can make less money, which means cheaper health care.
Now you might say "Well stdarg that's peanuts, that just won't make a dent at all!" and that's true, but again, it's just one of a host of other things that countries do to keep costs down. We could adopt many of those things ourselves and start to see cost savings WITHOUT completely revamping our system. Making med school cheaper and faster does not require single-payer.
Does the American way have to be in favor of debt and death?
Yes because the American way is antithetical to the nanny state -- you're going to have more debt and death because you have more freedom. It's a tradeoff, just like the freedom to go 75 mph on the highway leads to more deaths than if cars were universally limited to 15 mph.
We are the only industrialized country where people can go bankrupt over health care costs.
Well now I'm not sure how to take that because that may be a good thing or a bad thing. You know that when you "go bankrupt" that means you're not responsible for your debts anymore right? So that's actually a good thing that came as a reaction to crazy stuff like debtor's prison that was going on back in England. Even today many countries have weaker bankruptcy protection than the US. Here, education loans are some of the only things you can't "go bankrupt" over and be excused from. But I recall reading about the effect of the housing collapse in Spain and apparently, if I'm recalling correctly, you cannot discharge housing debt in bankruptcy there, which means all the people who were underwater on their mortgage were basically trapped. They couldn't even move to a new area to get a job, they had to keep their old house and keep paying on it. It's pretty bad.
But of course that's not what you meant, you meant that people go bankrupt over health care costs as a code that health care costs are too high, which I fully agree with and that's what I'm talking about. We need to bring those costs down as a first step!
We are the only country where people can be denied health care because they don't have adequate funds.
Well in some countries you can be denied health care because you're too old or not healthy enough (e.g. organ transplants). So? There is going to be rationing no matter what system you adopt and it generally comes down to some kind of moral judgment (you didn't take care of yourself, so we're not going to help you) or financial (we don't care if you're nervous, you've had your allotted ultrasound for this trimester, we can't give everybody what they want).
The real solution is bringing down costs. Single-payer is one way to do so, but trying to control costs top-down like that can lead to problems like shortages and poor quality. Not to mention it's against the American way. (I mean why not have a single bank, a single phone company, a single car maker, etc. Well, because we don't want to live in that kind of country.. most of us anyway.)
Note: The ACA is, of course, not universal healthcare, but it's at least a step in the right direction. Hopefully we can keep moving and expand Medicare to everyone.
It's a step in the wrong direction because it raises total health care costs. More expensive health care means a smaller chance of universal coverage.
Congress doesn't get to not fund bills that have passed.
That is exactly what Congress gets to do.
That is why split Congress is less stable.
That is why you don't pass huge complicated legislation with no bipartisan support and with a majority of the public opposing it.
We can't allow a small group of cranks to hijack our government whenever they don't get their way.
Yes, a small group of cranks who were elected to a majority in the House of Representatives, where spending and tax bills are required to originate.
Duh... I forgot.. Obamacare proponents don't give a shit about "the will of the people" or any nonsense like that. That's how we ended up with Obamacare in the first place!
The question is "guess how much that costs" and the answer is "less than Obamacare because otherwise total health care costs would be going down now instead of up."
thing is....who pays for old people in this country? Medicaire. And what is Medicaire? A centralized single payer system....just like Canada's... that also happens to be the most efficient and cost effective sector of our health care system.
Medicare is efficient because the average amount of spending per patient is several times larger than in private health insurance. Even if Medicare has 50% higher per-patient overhead, it looks "more efficient" because the bill is 500% larger.
If we extended Medicare to the entire country, the much vaunted efficiency of Medicare would drop into the toilet.
So, what you are saying is the Republican-controlled House is essentially holding hostage the government and the financial stability of the country because they don't like a law
Why would you say this? Why don't you say that the Democrats are essentially holding hostage the government and the financial stability of the country because they don't like a law (i.e. the spending bill the Republicans have put forward).
The job of legislators is to negotiate, to get what is needed done for the good of the people of this country.
So you're saying the Republicans should "negotiate" by doing exactly what the Democrats want, because the Democrats have a majority in the Senate. Why shouldn't the Senate Democrats do exactly what the Republicans want since they have a majority in the House?
This is why the law shouldn't have been passed to begin with. There was no bipartisan support in Congress, and the people were also divided with a majority being against the law.
It's an unwanted law. Now to fight it people are playing dirty. What did you expect? It's like if Republicans abolished all welfare programs, cut income taxes for the middle class and rich to 0% while the poor pay 90%, etc.. all with a 51% vote. You don't think the Democrats would do whatever they could to block the new laws?? That's dumb.
If you want to pass huge sweeping legislation, you build up support for it first.
I didn't/don't support Obamacare, but with the right compromise I would -- the compromise I want is that it needs to include meaningful cost saving measures.
You lose a vote once, you try again a couple more after some persuasion, sure.
BUT NOT FIFTY TIMES.
Again: at what point do Republicans ackowledge that the reality of democracy is that you dont always get what you want, and that sometimes you're on the losing (minority) side?
Well you should pass on that advice to the Democrats in the Senate. You know that the Republicans have a majority in the House of Representatives, right? And the House is responsible for all bills involving spending money and raising taxes?
So the Democrats are in the minority on this issue.
We have a divided Congress. The people voted it that way. They wanted Republicans to be in charge of spending. The Democrats need to suck it up and admit defeat when it comes to spending matters, including defunding Obamacare.
Considering how many people are killed in traffic accidents compared to say, murderers, then he is doing it right.
Raw numbers aren't the only, or the biggest, factor. There's a reason why someone who commits premeditated murder against just one victim is punished more harshly than someone who kills 3 people in a traffic accident.
I was suggesting that this cycle of poverty can be easily broken by people not stuck within the cycle.
Looking at people on welfare in the US, it seems like it's not very easy to break the cycle even when you're giving people tens of thousands a year in cash, food, housing, and public education. Some people get off welfare, others are on for much of their lives just like their parents before them.
What you're saying is an attractive excuse because it puts the blame on poverty rather than the people themselves, but does it make sense? There are some investments that require money, some that require time, or both. The ones that require a time investment and yield a time savings can be done almost immediately. I don't think there are many communities on the planet where every person works at maximum capacity ALL the time. It's certainly not happening in the entire developing world simultaneously. Someone in the community has some extra time, guaranteed.
The ones that take money can generally be accomplished by groups of people. In a community where everybody lives on $1/day, maybe the community lives on $100/day, which is $36k/year. When everybody sacrifices a penny, it makes no difference to them and accomplishes nothing, but when the community sacrifices $360/year, that's enough to make small investments.
Then there are things like division of labor that can be applied with no investment at all and that yield huge efficiency gains right away. I'm guessing it's mostly societal norms that prevent more of these from being adopted. If you think every woman should be at home making all the meals herself on a dung-fueled stove, that is forcing inefficiency. Instead you could have a small group of people cook for the whole community, freeing up a huge amount of labor. You lose the ability to customize your meal. Big whoop. If you have a superstitious/religious problem with birth control and are unable to practice abstinence, you end up with too many kids and once again with traditional roles half your population is tied down in inefficient uses of time. When you put it that way, it sounds very narrow-minded, selfish, and self-defeating of the community rather than a noble problem of simply not having the resources to make an initial investment for thousands of years.
To top it off, these people don't live in isolation and don't have to reinvent the path to modernity on their own. Every country in the world has population centers, wealthy people, education systems, and charities.
Then they could cook a meal, run a generator, make creosote for preserving wood and make more fuel simultaneously. Wrap the pipe with copper tubing and heat water for a bath.
I'm reminded of something I heard from a nutritionist years ago. They had a list of stages that a person is in with respect to nutrition with stage 1 being horrible nutrition with no interest in changing their ways and stage 7 being ideal, or something like that. Some of the stages were just mental like "finding out about nutrition" or "showing interest in change." Well it turns out the goal of the nutritionist isn't to take to a stage 1 person and shove him into stage 5 or 7. That fails almost every time. The goal is to move the stage n guy to stage n+1. Then you let someone else worry about the rest.. a social worker.. family.. or maybe that person will come back to you later.
I'm sure it's not a perfect parallel but it just strikes me as hubris that you think you're going to take a community that cooks with dung on a dirt floor in an unventilated room and move them to what you're describing in one step, and criticizing people who are taking a more conservative approach as the "pat-yourself-on-the-back-for-helping" type.
I mean you MIGHT be right that 5 minutes of Youtube research would trump this large university-led project, but it sounds like they've done at least some market research, and probably learned from more ambitious but failed experiments in the past.
Slashdot Mirror
If the corporations are controlling the government, then the corporations that are in control of the government are actually the government. It's still the government that has the power.
Hopefully Japan will commit to providing live streaming of all events over the Internet at 8k! That would be awesome and impressive.
It sucks precisely because the government is ineffective,
That's incorrect though. It sucks because the government has absolutely no limit to its power.
If you're in the ICU's jurisdiction, you would not be saying "Haha government is so weak here, you can ignore it if you want." You'd be executed for doing the most minor thing if it didn't fall in line with the ICU's orders, especially as a presumably Western non-Muslim guy (just guessing).
Sure it has a government, but under the same argument, so does Afghanistan
Yes, of course Afghanistan has government... I don't understand... in your mind, who is Afghan President Karzai (i.e. does he exist), and who do you think Karzai want to have peace talks with? Taliban Services LLC?
I'm sorry but I strongly object to your characterization of these forces as non-governmental. They are governmental because they are trying to govern the society. That's what a government does, it's what the word means. The government is literally that which governs the governed. If you're being governed by the laws of the ICU, or the Taliban, or the Nazis, or Jamaica or America, then that entity is your government whether you like it or not, whether history judges them kindly or not.
There are few places on earth that lack government. Somalia and Afghanistan are not among them. They are hotly contested areas with multiple competing governments, each of which are far stronger than the individual or family.
Nonetheless, "Reagan was bad for the common man" (domestically and internationally) is an objective historical fact supported by abundant evidence, like "Hitler was bad for the Jews."
Except that it's not at all like that.
What are these objective historical facts?
I know plenty of objective historical facts about why Hitler was bad for the Jews.
I know a handful of objective historical facts about why Reagan was GOOD for the "common man" (like rising median incomes during his term, increased fiscal stability for Social Security, etc), and none about why he was bad. So enlighten me, if you have actual facts to back that up that are as uncontroversial as Hitler vs. the Jews.
Of course good teachers try to use student behavior as a force of good in the classroom.
That's an exploitative teacher, not a good one.
With this system, Mrs. G. could have labelled me red (40%) in some "character" category and that data would stay with me into seventh grade. So the seventh grade teacher could say "oh, little Sir Garlon is an insubordinate slacker, I'd better not waste my limited time on him -- I'll concentrate on the yellow students because I need to end the year with 50% green to get tenure."
I understand your concern but this specific example isn't very good. If the teacher just picks a number subjectively like you say Mrs. G did, then the 7th grade teacher would set everybody to green to get tenure.
It would be huge progress if teachers had goal posts to which they were held accountable in some way (tenure, pay, whatever), and I think that would outweigh the abuses you're talking about. Teachers can already screw your grades if they don't like you, especially in less objective classes where you write papers instead of answering math questions.
They were taught well. He was incredibly bad for anyone but the rich
Check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Median_US_household_income.png
How is that BAD for the non-rich in 1981-1989??
specifically for his idiotic (probably more like disingenuous) "trickle down theory"
Trickle-down economics is accurate. What problem do you have with it? Consult the graph I linked to above if you think Reagan didn't make everybody richer.
and passing legislation that slashed the capital gains tax.
Yeah, ooh, the evil tax cutter, hurting the middle class.
Did you know that before 1997 the capital gains on selling your house was much more limited and only applied if you used the proceeds to buy a *more expensive* house?
So cutting capital gains was a direct way of helping retirees who were selling their house and downsizing.
You can't tell the difference between objective fact (world is round) and subjective evaluation based on the teacher's prejudices?
Sad.
Last I checked, it's quite easy to move to Somalia.
So based on that I assume you consider the Islamic Courts Union -- the radical Islamic group that seeks to control Somalia -- to be a... corporation? Not a government (or aspiring government)?
Somalia does not suck because of corporations, it sucks because of its government(s). People like you think of Somalia as a governmental vacuum but that's just ignorant of the real situation.
They can however, prevent me from obtaining employment (and being self-employed is not always an option folks), obtaining credit (That's an awfully nice credit score you have there...be a shame if something...happened...to it.), track my every movement through various means, take me to court on bogus charges then drop them forcing me to miss days of work to defend myself (if I am already employed), or bill me for services they did not provide and force me to spend more time and money fighting them in court.
All of that stuff is much easier for the government, and far more likely to happen by the hand of the government.
You know what power a disgruntled phone representative from Some Big Corp Inc. has? None! What can they do, fraudulently sign you up for a service? Have you never disputed a charge with your credit company? It takes 30 seconds.
Unless you manage to seriously piss off the CEO of a Fortune 500 company none of the stuff you said could happen to you.
On the other hand, a corrupt cop, a building inspector who is having a bad day, a teacher or principal who doesn't like your child... they can all make your life pretty shitty. Not the Police Chief, not the Mayor, not the President... one little corrupt official.
THAT is the difference in power between government and corporations.
The people who made the promises are the ones who created the Ponzi scheme, the people who are getting SS benefits now are the victims of those lies.
In a broad sense they're not the victims of the lie until and unless SS is reformed in a way that has a net financial harm on them. In other words cutting their promised benefits does not make them victims if they're still getting more than they paid into the system.
And as for the promise.. from day 1 of SS, it was NOT a program that entitled you to or guaranteed a certain benefit, like a savings bond might be construed. It was billed as an insurance program that would help you in retirement. Well no matter how much they cut benefits, if they're still helping you, the promise is kept.
Like I said, if you want to give all the people who have paid into SS their money back with interest, then fine.
This is the best possible outcome for SS but sooooo unlikely to happen unfortunately.
You'd probably be up in arms if you had gone to K-Mart a year ago and put a nice new television on layaway, paying a little bit every month, only to be told "no TV for you, you leech upon society" when you made the last payment and expected to take the TV home. That's what you want to do to SS.
Strawman? Looking over the existing thread, and having personally engaged in many such discussions over the years, people who want to terminate or privatize SS are not saying "Thanks for all the money, now get lost." You are morally entitled to get back most or all that you paid plus interest and I think most people (even anti-SS people) have no problem agreeing with that. (I mean technically a lot of SS money has already been returned to the people since the government takes the SS money and spends it on projects that supposedly benefit us all.. so it's like if you loan someone $10000, then they spend $5000 of it paying for your college, and then you're like "give me back my $10k!")
There are many simple and intuitive ways to end SS, if still painfully either to retirees or youth (some split seems most appropriate), but less painful than it will be if we keep putting it off.
One thing we can do immediately to lay the groundwork is to relabel SS payments as welfare as soon as you get more money than you paid in (plus the interest your money earned in T-bills) so that people understand they did not EARN or PAY for their continued benefits. If the government gave every person a report of how much money they contributed, how much it has earned in investments, and how much has been withdrawn, people would suddenly see that the money isn't unlimited, nor was it stolen by the government or whatever (that's a common theme among people who don't understand the whole "invest in T-bills" thing. And if you have a negative balance, you're on welfare. Simple, and honest.
Just doing that would clear up a lot of misunderstanding about the fiscal nature of the program. I talk to idiots on the internet all the time who tell me they paid into the system and earned their benefits and I point out that the SS tax they paid for much of their career was less than half of the current rate which I've been paying since day 1 of my career. Which of us is REALLY paid in then?
Hmm I'm not sure what number you're referring to, I didn't mention any numbers...
Health care costs twice as much per capita here as it does elsewhere, and we do NOT have universal coverage.. it sounds like you're agreeing with me.
Except that nothing else is effective at it - at least nothing that has yet been tried or proposed - in comparison to what a single payer system can do.
I don't know about that -- other countries that have single-payer systems ALSO have a host of other things that are making health care cheaper. It's demonstrable and makes perfect intuitive sense. One example is that in America you get an undergrad degree before going to medical school. In many countries, you don't -- there's a single extra year of medical school (at most) that replaces 4 years of undergrad. That's going to save doctors a lot of loans, plus get them earning faster, which means they can make less money, which means cheaper health care.
Now you might say "Well stdarg that's peanuts, that just won't make a dent at all!" and that's true, but again, it's just one of a host of other things that countries do to keep costs down. We could adopt many of those things ourselves and start to see cost savings WITHOUT completely revamping our system. Making med school cheaper and faster does not require single-payer.
Does the American way have to be in favor of debt and death?
Yes because the American way is antithetical to the nanny state -- you're going to have more debt and death because you have more freedom. It's a tradeoff, just like the freedom to go 75 mph on the highway leads to more deaths than if cars were universally limited to 15 mph.
We are the only industrialized country where people can go bankrupt over health care costs.
Well now I'm not sure how to take that because that may be a good thing or a bad thing. You know that when you "go bankrupt" that means you're not responsible for your debts anymore right? So that's actually a good thing that came as a reaction to crazy stuff like debtor's prison that was going on back in England. Even today many countries have weaker bankruptcy protection than the US. Here, education loans are some of the only things you can't "go bankrupt" over and be excused from. But I recall reading about the effect of the housing collapse in Spain and apparently, if I'm recalling correctly, you cannot discharge housing debt in bankruptcy there, which means all the people who were underwater on their mortgage were basically trapped. They couldn't even move to a new area to get a job, they had to keep their old house and keep paying on it. It's pretty bad.
But of course that's not what you meant, you meant that people go bankrupt over health care costs as a code that health care costs are too high, which I fully agree with and that's what I'm talking about. We need to bring those costs down as a first step!
We are the only country where people can be denied health care because they don't have adequate funds.
Well in some countries you can be denied health care because you're too old or not healthy enough (e.g. organ transplants). So? There is going to be rationing no matter what system you adopt and it generally comes down to some kind of moral judgment (you didn't take care of yourself, so we're not going to help you) or financial (we don't care if you're nervous, you've had your allotted ultrasound for this trimester, we can't give everybody what they want).
The real solution is bringing down costs. Single-payer is one way to do so, but trying to control costs top-down like that can lead to problems like shortages and poor quality. Not to mention it's against the American way. (I mean why not have a single bank, a single phone company, a single car maker, etc. Well, because we don't want to live in that kind of country.. most of us anyway.)
Note: The ACA is, of course, not universal healthcare, but it's at least a step in the right direction. Hopefully we can keep moving and expand Medicare to everyone.
It's a step in the wrong direction because it raises total health care costs. More expensive health care means a smaller chance of universal coverage.
Congress doesn't get to not fund bills that have passed.
That is exactly what Congress gets to do.
That is why split Congress is less stable.
That is why you don't pass huge complicated legislation with no bipartisan support and with a majority of the public opposing it.
We can't allow a small group of cranks to hijack our government whenever they don't get their way.
Yes, a small group of cranks who were elected to a majority in the House of Representatives, where spending and tax bills are required to originate.
Duh... I forgot.. Obamacare proponents don't give a shit about "the will of the people" or any nonsense like that. That's how we ended up with Obamacare in the first place!
Who cares?
The question is "guess how much that costs" and the answer is "less than Obamacare because otherwise total health care costs would be going down now instead of up."
thing is....who pays for old people in this country? Medicaire.
And what is Medicaire? A centralized single payer system....just like Canada's... that also happens to be the most efficient and cost effective sector of our health care system.
Medicare is efficient because the average amount of spending per patient is several times larger than in private health insurance. Even if Medicare has 50% higher per-patient overhead, it looks "more efficient" because the bill is 500% larger.
If we extended Medicare to the entire country, the much vaunted efficiency of Medicare would drop into the toilet.
So, what you are saying is the Republican-controlled House is essentially holding hostage the government and the financial stability of the country because they don't like a law
Why would you say this? Why don't you say that the Democrats are essentially holding hostage the government and the financial stability of the country because they don't like a law (i.e. the spending bill the Republicans have put forward).
The job of legislators is to negotiate, to get what is needed done for the good of the people of this country.
So you're saying the Republicans should "negotiate" by doing exactly what the Democrats want, because the Democrats have a majority in the Senate. Why shouldn't the Senate Democrats do exactly what the Republicans want since they have a majority in the House?
Don't you see the symmetry here??
This is why the law shouldn't have been passed to begin with. There was no bipartisan support in Congress, and the people were also divided with a majority being against the law.
It's an unwanted law. Now to fight it people are playing dirty. What did you expect? It's like if Republicans abolished all welfare programs, cut income taxes for the middle class and rich to 0% while the poor pay 90%, etc.. all with a 51% vote. You don't think the Democrats would do whatever they could to block the new laws?? That's dumb.
If you want to pass huge sweeping legislation, you build up support for it first.
I didn't/don't support Obamacare, but with the right compromise I would -- the compromise I want is that it needs to include meaningful cost saving measures.
You lose a vote once, you try again a couple more after some persuasion, sure.
BUT NOT FIFTY TIMES.
Again: at what point do Republicans ackowledge that the reality of democracy is that you dont always get what you want, and that sometimes you're on the losing (minority) side?
Well you should pass on that advice to the Democrats in the Senate. You know that the Republicans have a majority in the House of Representatives, right? And the House is responsible for all bills involving spending money and raising taxes?
So the Democrats are in the minority on this issue.
We have a divided Congress. The people voted it that way. They wanted Republicans to be in charge of spending. The Democrats need to suck it up and admit defeat when it comes to spending matters, including defunding Obamacare.
Considering how many people are killed in traffic accidents compared to say, murderers, then he is doing it right.
Raw numbers aren't the only, or the biggest, factor. There's a reason why someone who commits premeditated murder against just one victim is punished more harshly than someone who kills 3 people in a traffic accident.
I was suggesting that this cycle of poverty can be easily broken by people not stuck within the cycle.
Looking at people on welfare in the US, it seems like it's not very easy to break the cycle even when you're giving people tens of thousands a year in cash, food, housing, and public education. Some people get off welfare, others are on for much of their lives just like their parents before them.
What you're saying is an attractive excuse because it puts the blame on poverty rather than the people themselves, but does it make sense? There are some investments that require money, some that require time, or both. The ones that require a time investment and yield a time savings can be done almost immediately. I don't think there are many communities on the planet where every person works at maximum capacity ALL the time. It's certainly not happening in the entire developing world simultaneously. Someone in the community has some extra time, guaranteed.
The ones that take money can generally be accomplished by groups of people. In a community where everybody lives on $1/day, maybe the community lives on $100/day, which is $36k/year. When everybody sacrifices a penny, it makes no difference to them and accomplishes nothing, but when the community sacrifices $360/year, that's enough to make small investments.
Then there are things like division of labor that can be applied with no investment at all and that yield huge efficiency gains right away. I'm guessing it's mostly societal norms that prevent more of these from being adopted. If you think every woman should be at home making all the meals herself on a dung-fueled stove, that is forcing inefficiency. Instead you could have a small group of people cook for the whole community, freeing up a huge amount of labor. You lose the ability to customize your meal. Big whoop. If you have a superstitious/religious problem with birth control and are unable to practice abstinence, you end up with too many kids and once again with traditional roles half your population is tied down in inefficient uses of time. When you put it that way, it sounds very narrow-minded, selfish, and self-defeating of the community rather than a noble problem of simply not having the resources to make an initial investment for thousands of years.
To top it off, these people don't live in isolation and don't have to reinvent the path to modernity on their own. Every country in the world has population centers, wealthy people, education systems, and charities.
Then they could cook a meal, run a generator, make creosote for preserving wood and make more fuel simultaneously. Wrap the pipe with copper tubing and heat water for a bath.
I'm reminded of something I heard from a nutritionist years ago. They had a list of stages that a person is in with respect to nutrition with stage 1 being horrible nutrition with no interest in changing their ways and stage 7 being ideal, or something like that. Some of the stages were just mental like "finding out about nutrition" or "showing interest in change." Well it turns out the goal of the nutritionist isn't to take to a stage 1 person and shove him into stage 5 or 7. That fails almost every time. The goal is to move the stage n guy to stage n+1. Then you let someone else worry about the rest.. a social worker.. family.. or maybe that person will come back to you later.
I'm sure it's not a perfect parallel but it just strikes me as hubris that you think you're going to take a community that cooks with dung on a dirt floor in an unventilated room and move them to what you're describing in one step, and criticizing people who are taking a more conservative approach as the "pat-yourself-on-the-back-for-helping" type.
I mean you MIGHT be right that 5 minutes of Youtube research would trump this large university-led project, but it sounds like they've done at least some market research, and probably learned from more ambitious but failed experiments in the past.