Even Theodor Meron, the legal counsel of Israel's foreign ministry, concluded in 1967 that it would be illegal to place settlements in the conquered territories.
Germany attacked the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union trounced them. By your logic, the Soviet Union should own all the property in Germany, including private homes, even if they were originally confiscated from Jews. That's not the law.
Even Theodor Meron, the legal counsel of Israel's foreign ministry, concluded in 1967 that it would be illegal to place settlements in the conquered territories.
Germany attacked the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union beat them back. By your logic, the Soviet Union should own all the property in Germany, including private homes, even if they were originally confiscated from Jews. That's not the law.
So, essentially, you're saying that the people fighting the US in Afghanistan with desperate means like suicide bombers are doing what's justified to fight for the survival of their way of life?
The Wall Street Journal (pre-Murdoch) interviewed an American soldier who lost his arm to an IED.
He said he didn't feel any resentment towards them. "If they invaded Texas, I would have done the same thing."
OK, so the Nazi army invades Poland, confiscates a Jew's apartment house and gives it to a Nazi.
The Soviet army invades Poland on their way to Berlin and confiscates all the Nazi property.
The war is over. Who owns the apartment house?
Answer: The Polish government, and the Soviet government, agreed that it belonged to the Jew. A girl whose family owned an apartment house like that wrote a book about it, and a story on NPR, about it. There have been many legal cases, and they usually find that the Jews owned the property that was lost in war.
(When the documents are lost or destroyed in war, it can be almost impossible to establish a legal claim, but that's another issue. They've had global settlements to simplify things.)
Since WWII, international lawyers (many of them Jewish) decided to change the laws and pass treaties to make it clear that "To The Victor Goes The Spoils Of War" is not the law. Even Israel's own lawyers recognize that.
Is it really a promise broken if everyone knew you were lying to start with?
Most people, at least those I have talked to, have very little understanding of the accounting fiction that is known as the Social Security trust fund.
Do you think Paul Krugman, the Nobel economics laureate and Princeton economics professor, understands economics?
They don't realize all those taxes are spent immediately, rather than being saved for the future.
Since the taxes are exchanged by securities that are both held by and issued by the same entity, I like to use this example: The Social Security trust fund amounts to taking a dollar from your right pocket and an IOU written to yourself from the left, exchanging pockets, then spending the dollar.
Since at least the renaissance, accountants realized that if you put your savings in gold and hid it under the mattress, you would actually lose money compared to what you would make if you loaned it out for even the safest investments, over the long run.
Accountants also understand internal transfers. The advertising department of GE advertises washing machines, and they bill the washing machine division of GE as an internal transfer. Or they could spin off the advertising department into an independent advertising agency, as companies sometimes do, and bill them as an external payment. They would have essentially the same obligations in either case. The IOUs help GE's accountants track how much money each division is spending on advertising, so they can charge each division appropriately for the advertising (pay the IOUs).
The advertising department is GE's left pocket. The washing machine division is GE's right pocket. What's the problem with GE transferring money from its right pocket to its left pocket?
The Social Security trust fund is an intergenerational transfer. The government provides free education for children, which is a transfer from the old (the left pocket) to the young (the right pocket). Social Security is a transfer from the young (the right pocket) to the old (the left pocket).
Social Security is also a transfer to young people with elderly parents. Having to care for elderly parents can be a great burden, and before Social Security, it was even worse. Even today, people caring for elderly parents can have their savings (and inheritance) wiped out. Social Security cushions you against that risk. So you don't have the burden of caring for your parents who invested with Bernie Madoff. Social
You claim that the IOU amounts to savings, because it is owed to you, but omit the fact that it's also a debt because you are the one liable for payment of that IOU. So the books say you have a dollar, but when the time comes to pay, you have to come up with money from somewhere else in order to actually make good.
It's not a savings, it's a generational transfer fund with some components of savings.
They don't need savings at all, but some people want to pay now rather than later. The Republicans under Ronald Reagan insisted on putting (some of) it in a lockbox, so we put it in a lockbox.
Do you want the Social Security Administration to take everybody's FICA payments and put them in a vault, like Scrooge McDuck's money bin? As accountants realized in the renaissance, instead of leaving the money in a vault, you can use it for safe investments. Having one government department lending money to another, as private companies like GE do, is one of the safest investments they can get. Rather than selling Treasury bonds to the Chinese, they sell Treasury bonds to the Social Security trust fund.
The US is living beyond its means. Eventually, something has to give. Politicians rarely get elected by telling the truth though, since the average voter is too stupid to be able to handle it readily. They just get mad and throw gasoline onto the fire that is current partisan politics.
Paul Krugman is a Nobel prize-winning economist and an economics professor at Princeton. You ought to consider the possibility that he understands this better than you do.
Don't you realize? No-one under 30 expects to see anything from it. To them it's just another tax with no hope of return.
That's because the Republicans and their right-wing think tanks have conned them in to believing this nonsense.
A bunch of billionaires don't want to pay taxes so they're coming up with this con to convince *everybody* not to pay taxes -- and lose the benefits of government. The Koch brothers on their guarded estates don't need government, but the rest of us do.
If they can convince enough of you, it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Given that, make it official - declare we are paying in to help those in the system now, but it ends with them and we start doing something sane where we sock away money per person, for that person-
Yes, that's step 2 of the Republican plan -- convince you that Social Security will never pay out, so we should destroy it.
You can't buy an annuity on the free market that will pay as well as Social Security. Overall, people can't invest their money in the free market as safely as they can invest in Social Security. Look at all the people who lost their life savings in the technology bubble. Look at all the people who lost their life savings in the real estate bubble. Look at the people who lost half their life savings in the stock market crash, even when they invested in the safest stocks.
Do you think you're smarter than them?
Why don't you put your life savings in your back pocket, fly to Monaco, go to the roulette wheel, and put everything on black? That's what you want us all to do. Under some scenarios, people will do better in a no-load mutual fund, but under other (real) scenarios, they'll lose their shirt. It's even riskier if you try to beat the no-load mutual funds, and try to be clever.
with some extra taken to help the truly needy.
Look at the way these same conservatives are cutting taxes and the social safety net to help the "truly needy". Instead of getting Social Security as a right, you want a government bureaucrat to decide whether we're "truly needy".
Anyone up for retirement more than ten years out better have arranged their own finances.
Although I enjoy cranky anti-government fantasies too, it's better to stay closer to reality. The Republicans are beating this anti-Social Security line because they want to say, "Social Security isn't going to be there for you, so let's end it and save you all those tax deductions" (which are the lowest in the developed world).
If Ronald Reagan had said, back in the 1980s, “Let’s increase a regressive tax that falls mainly on the working class, while cutting taxes that fall mainly on much richer people,” he would have faced a political firestorm. But because the increase in the regressive payroll tax was recommended by the Greenspan Commission to support Social Security, it was politically in a different box – you might even call it a lockbox – from Reagan’s tax cuts.
Their answer to the pretty good numbers is to say that the trust fund is meaningless, because it’s invested in U.S. government bonds. They aren’t really saying that government bonds are worthless; their point is that the whole notion of a separate budget for Social Security is a fiction.
But there are two problems with their position.
The lesser problem is that if you say that there is no link between the payroll tax and future Social Security benefits – which is what denying the reality of the trust fund amounts to – then Greenspan and company pulled a fast one back in the 1980s: they sold a regressive tax switch, raising taxes on workers while cutting them on the wealthy, on false pretenses. More broadly, we’re breaking a major promise if we now, after 20 years of high payroll taxes to pay for Social Security’s future, declare that it was all a little joke on the public.
The bigger problem for those who want to see a crisis in Social Security’s future is this: if Social Security is just part of the federal budget, with no budget or trust fund of its own, then, well, it’s just part of the federal budget: there can’t be a Social Security crisis.
Actually, humans and many other animals evolved with a strong commitment to fairness.
Do a Google search for "evolution of cooperation".
In experimental settings, like variations of the prisoner's dilemma, people will refuse choices where they will get greater rewards in favor of choices that they fell is fair.
For example, if you got $100 to divide, and you took $90 for yourself and offered $10 to me, and I could (1) accept it, or (2) reject it and have neither of us get anything, most people would reject it.
And if you're acting like a freeloader while the rest of us are trying to cooperate, most people would pay money to make you suffer a penalty.
Primary identification Must include full name, date of birth, and photo
You need a *driver's license* to get a non-driver's ID. Either that or a current passport or military ID, or non-citizen IDs.
I couldn't get this non-driver's ID in Texas without using my current driver's license. I don't even have a current passport (which cost over $100). To get a passport, I needed -- a driver's license.
The US and the UK have a similar legal system with different actors.
I don't think the US Supreme Court would accept that standard for criminal liability of directors.
In US criminal trials, the prosecutors are always looking for emails or wiretaps that would prove the higher-ups had specific knowledge.
In Connick v. Thompson, the US Supreme Court just reversed a lower court decision, http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2011/03/us_supreme_court_rejects_14_mi.html that held the New Orleans prosecutor civilly liable for withholding evidence in a case that sent an innocent man to jail for 18 years, including 14 years on death row. That was a civil case, not a criminal case, so Thompson had to meet an even lower standard of evidence.
As I understand it, the lower-level prosecutors who withhold evidence are committing perjury, and I think they should be disbarred and sent to jail. I can't think of a case in which it's happened.
I think the major problem that Smith identifies is that Murdoch has leveraged his media empire for political influence, which he then uses to break the law with impunity. In the US, it's fairly easy for a manager to insulate himself from criminal charges through subordinates. He may not be able to get away with that in the UK.
(1) If she didn't know about the phone hacking, then she was printing stuff in her paper without knowing the sources, and she was incompetent. (Didn't Ben Bradley, the editor of the Washington Post, know the identity of Deep Throat?)
(2) If she did know about the phone hacking then she was committing a crime.
I hope she'll be testifying under oath soon. Wonder what she'll say.
Actually, most of the worlds scientific research doesn't come from the US
I was wondering about that.
We have a lot of US exceptionalists who claim that most of the research *does* come from the US. It sounds like BS but OTOH the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health do fund a lot of research. And there's lots of military research. I'd like to have something to come back at them with.
Do you have any numbers to support that claim? It should be true, but I'd like to be able to document it.
After all, most of the world's military spending does come from the US.
There were obscure neurology and other journals that researchers in the field had to have, and subscription prices were going up to $2,000 a year (and they may still be there). They do go through an editorial process of peer review and editorials, and they do print some high-quality photos and illustrations. But the important editorial work is done free.
This isn't brain surgery. The clerical work can be done by the department secretary. The subscribers finally decided they could do it cheaper themselves, especially after the Internet, and started publishing open-source journals, like PLoS. There are expenses that somebody has to pay, but it's cheaper for the authors to pay page fees up front than for the same authors (as subscribers) to pay huge subscription fees.
There are lots of new small book publishers who use print-on-demand technology and outlets like Amazon.com to go around the traditional publishers.
You've given me an idea now. I know lots of freelancers who work for those same academic presses. If you have a small budget, you could hire an extra administrative assistant and some freelancers to put out your own journal directly. It's not trivial, but it's a lot cheaper.
Taxpayer funded research should not be behind pay walls or restricted in any other manner. Exception for information with military applications...mostly.
Can somebody who follows this more closely help me with this?
The National Library of Medicine compiled an internal database of almost every significant medical journal article. With encouragement from Al Gore, they made it free on the Internet as PubMed (on the theory that the public should have free access to the product of tax-funded work). http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed
Either the NLM or another government agency also created a database of articles about chemistry. They also wanted to make it public. However, the American Chemical Society was producing a proprietary database, which it licensed very profitably, which did the same thing, and the free government database would have replaced it. The ACS successfully lobbied the government to prevent the agency from making this database free to the public like PubMed.
You don't have enough background in health care to understand this.
You're making assumptions based on your beliefs about the way the market and the health care segment of the economy works, and you're ignoring the facts about way it actually works. You are indeed like the Austrian economists, who follow theory and ignore empirical evidence.
You're just speculating about guidelines. You don't understand how they work. Doctors are well aware of conflicts of interest, and they've developed procedures to avoid or cancel out conflicts of interest.
I read many guidelines and talked to the doctors who wrote them. I've been to medical meetings where they debated guidelines. You've probably never read a medical guideline. You don't know the facts.
Despite your speculations and assumptions, the UK NICE, US government agencies, government health care systems around the world, independent organizations like the Cochrane Collaboration, private insurance companies, and professional societies usually agree on the same guidelines. The guidelines don't simply promote their own financial interest. If they do, doctors recognize it and ignore them.
Everybody knows that patients die in the end. You're giving platitudes as if you had discovered a new idea. The issue is how long they will live, under what conditions, and how much it will cost. There are good answers to these questions and they're not the answers you think.
It's not true that people want to live forever with unlimited health care. I wonder whether you actually know people in their 60s, 70s and 80s. Elderly people have the experience of death and sickness all around them -- that is, unlike you they know what the facts are, and they know what medical care can and can't do. Elderly people usually say that they want to live with as much independence as possible. They want to live without pain. They want to avoid unnecessary medical procedures. They know they're going to die soon and aggressive medical care in people their age usually does more harm than good. It's not a free market in which the more you spend the longer you live.
Scientists often say that the important results are the ones that go against intuition and conventional wisdom. You're just following your own intuition and conventional wisdom. Things *seem* obvious to you, but they've been studied and disproven in well-designed research.
I can't give you a tutorial on health care economics, especially since your mind is made up and when somebody gives you the facts you just come up with excuses to reject them. You're not willing to put aside your preconceptions and do the hard work.
If you want to understand this subject, the best way to start is probably to read the articles on health care policy in the New England Journal of Medicine, some of which are free online at www.nejm.org. Paul Krugman has probably written the best explanations of the economics of health care, but you're probably going to reject him out of hand.
There are many obscure diseases and sometimes it can be almost impossible for the best specialists to diagnose them in the best hospitals.
I assume you've taken your mother to one of the best academic hospitals in your area. It's worth spending the effort on a good diagnosis, if that can keep her out of a nursing home. But if you've done that, then you've done all you can do. Sometimes they just can't find the cause.
In medicine doctors throughout the developed world have a generally agreed upon standard of care. They're called guidelines. Even the private insurance companies agree on them.
Some procedures are cost-beneficial. If they can save the life of a 4-year-old girl for $100,000 (with leukemia, for example) they do it. In the UK, they'll spend $50,000 (sometimes more) to save a human life. They don't determine the value of a human life on the free market.
Medical care is not like other goods or services. Most people want a system in which everybody gets at least that established standard of care.
Whatever you believe, the overwhelming majority of people in this country, and most developed countries, are not willing to let people die if they can't afford standard health care. They're not willing to let a 4-year-old girl die unnecessarily if she could be saved for $100,000. Are you? The only way they can do that reliably is through the government.
By "working" I mean a system that can provide that standard care to the overwhelming majority of the country's residents. Nobody has been able to provide care for the poor through the free market.
In medicine doctors throughout the developed world have a generally agreed upon standard of care. They're called guidelines. Even the private insurance companies agree on them.
Some procedures are cost-beneficial. If they can save the life of a 4-year-old girl for $100,000 (with leukemia, for example) they do it. In the UK, they'll spend $50,000 (sometimes more) to save a human life. They don't determine the value of a human life on the basis of what people are willing to pay to save their lives on the free market.
Medical care is not like other goods or services. It's not like the market for food in which some people choose to get steak and other people get hamburger. Most people want a system in which everybody gets at least that established standard of care.
Whatever you believe, the overwhelming majority of people in this country, and most developed countries, are not willing to let people die if they can't afford standard health care. They're not willing to let a 4-year-old girl die unnecessarily if she could be saved for $100,000. They consider that to be a legitimate function of government. That's what most people want, and if you want to live in a democracy you have to go along with that value judgment. The only way they can save people like that reliably is through the government.
By "working" I mean a system that can provide that standard care to the overwhelming majority of the country's residents. Nobody has been able to provide care for the poor through the free market.
Obamacare is indeed a vast subsidy system for the private insurance system. It's not a single payer system.
Doctors and health policy analysts around the world love to compare health care systems, and there's a lot of data on the differences between them.
I'll compare the Canadian vs. U.S. health care system, because I know a lot about that. Most people who have studied it say that U.S. care is more expensive than Canadian care because of (1) the private insurance system, which adds administrative complexity and cost (2) greater use of technology like CAT and MRI scans in the U.S. (These scans are actually overused in the US. Experts say unnecessary CAT scans cause a significant increase in cancer, and unnecessary MRIs sometimes cause irreversible kidney failure, because some people are sensitive to the gadolinium contrast dye) (3) overtreatment generally, such as unnecessary drugs and surgery (4) higher salaries for specialists (5) higher prices for drugs. The VA system negotiates for lower prices, but Medicare by law isn't allowed to negotiate. That's about 90% of the difference between the U.S. and Canada.
A majority of Americans say on polls that they would prefer "Medicare for all." Their politicians "can't" give them that because they get contributions from the insurance industry and just plain side with the insurance industry. But if we had a government whose politicians followed the wishes of its voters, there's no economic or technical reason why we couldn't have a Canadian-style system.
If you believe in empirical evidence, compare the different health care systems worldwide, as the doctors and health care economists do. The most expensive is the U.S. The other system with the greatest free market component is the Swiss system, and they're the *second* most expensive system in the world. (Swiss insurance companies are much more heavily regulated, which is why they're cheaper.) The government-run health care systems cost about half as much as ours or less.
Doctors measure outcomes very carefully, because they want to know which procedures are working. The outcomes are about the same in all developed countries.
I don't know of a single developed country in the world with what you would call a "free market" health care system. It's never worked. Countries that tried it, like Singapore, had problems and moved to more of a government-run system.
In a free market, if your 5-year-old daughter has leukemia, and you can afford to pay for her treatment, she'll live, and if you can't afford it, she'll die. People won't accept that.
While we are at it, the federal government is more efficient the private industry almost all the time.
I don't understand why people make this claim, but I see it over and over again. There are several things to remember that completely undermine this. First, government doesn't have to provide a positive return on investment. A business has to make a profit in order to continue to exist, a government agency or regulation does not.
Why is it desirable that an operation provides a positive return on its investment? For most government services, it isn't. How can the police, court system, primary school system, and health care system turn a profit? Do you want the police to charge victims a fee before they investigate a crime? Do you want to limit elementary and high school education only to those who can afford it? Are you going to limit health care to those who "create value" and let the others die if they get multiple sclerosis or leukemia and can't afford to pay for the health care they need to save their lives?
I looked up von Mises in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_school and I was suprised to see that the Austrian economists don't believe in empirical evidence. If you don't either, then there's no point in reading further, because this won't make any sense to you.
But the facts are that despite whatever your theory predicts, there are many services that the government can provide far more cheaply and efficiently than private enterprise.
The best example is health care. The Canadian health care system costs about half as much per capita as ours, and the outcomes are about as good (sometimes better). http://www.openmedicine.ca/article/view/8/1 If Americans could buy health care at the price, quality and service of Canadian care, it would be the most popular health insurance in the U.S.
Paul Krugman has provided lots of good arguments and data to show that government does a better job of providing health care than the private sector. One example is Medicare advantage. When the private insurance sector started to manage Medicare, they said they would save money. They now say that they can't continue to manage Medicare without a 15% premium over what government Medicare costs. Those are the facts. Of course if you don't believe in empirical facts, that won't convince you.
In health care, the problem with the free market, is that it's administratively more complex, which makes it more expensive. Unlike Medicare, private insurance companies have an army of clerks to figure out their contract arrangements with each patient and doctor. For these administrative costs, they charge you at least 15% of your premium dollar (and some of them complained because they couldn't charge 45% of the premium dollar). Medicare charges 2-3%.
Doctors complained in a recent article in JAMA that dealing with private insurance companies is the most stressful part of their job. Doctors spend about 15% of their staff time administering private insurance payments.
So after the insurance company takes 15 cents of your health care premium dollar in administrative costs, your doctor has to take another 15 cents to administer his insurance payments.
Bottom line: Government delivers health care more efficiently, at lower cost, and equal quality, than the private market. Ayn Rand was wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not the law.
Even Theodor Meron, the legal counsel of Israel's foreign ministry, concluded in 1967 that it would be illegal to place settlements in the conquered territories.
Germany attacked the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union trounced them. By your logic, the Soviet Union should own all the property in Germany, including private homes, even if they were originally confiscated from Jews. That's not the law.
That's not the law.
Even Theodor Meron, the legal counsel of Israel's foreign ministry, concluded in 1967 that it would be illegal to place settlements in the conquered territories.
Germany attacked the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union beat them back. By your logic, the Soviet Union should own all the property in Germany, including private homes, even if they were originally confiscated from Jews. That's not the law.
So, essentially, you're saying that the people fighting the US in Afghanistan with desperate means like suicide bombers are doing what's justified to fight for the survival of their way of life?
The Wall Street Journal (pre-Murdoch) interviewed an American soldier who lost his arm to an IED.
He said he didn't feel any resentment towards them. "If they invaded Texas, I would have done the same thing."
Were you Israel, what would you do?
Try my hardest to be decent to my neighbors, and to people in general. /quote>
We Jews have a saying: That which is hateful to you, do not do unto others.
Ignore it at your peril.
" To The Victor Goes The Spoils Of War".
OK, so the Nazi army invades Poland, confiscates a Jew's apartment house and gives it to a Nazi.
The Soviet army invades Poland on their way to Berlin and confiscates all the Nazi property.
The war is over. Who owns the apartment house?
Answer: The Polish government, and the Soviet government, agreed that it belonged to the Jew. A girl whose family owned an apartment house like that wrote a book about it, and a story on NPR, about it. There have been many legal cases, and they usually find that the Jews owned the property that was lost in war.
(When the documents are lost or destroyed in war, it can be almost impossible to establish a legal claim, but that's another issue. They've had global settlements to simplify things.)
Since WWII, international lawyers (many of them Jewish) decided to change the laws and pass treaties to make it clear that "To The Victor Goes The Spoils Of War" is not the law. Even Israel's own lawyers recognize that.
Is it really a promise broken if everyone knew you were lying to start with?
Most people, at least those I have talked to, have very little understanding of the accounting fiction that is known as the Social Security trust fund.
Do you think Paul Krugman, the Nobel economics laureate and Princeton economics professor, understands economics?
They don't realize all those taxes are spent immediately, rather than being saved for the future.
Since the taxes are exchanged by securities that are both held by and issued by the same entity, I like to use this example: The Social Security trust fund amounts to taking a dollar from your right pocket and an IOU written to yourself from the left, exchanging pockets, then spending the dollar.
Since at least the renaissance, accountants realized that if you put your savings in gold and hid it under the mattress, you would actually lose money compared to what you would make if you loaned it out for even the safest investments, over the long run.
Accountants also understand internal transfers. The advertising department of GE advertises washing machines, and they bill the washing machine division of GE as an internal transfer. Or they could spin off the advertising department into an independent advertising agency, as companies sometimes do, and bill them as an external payment. They would have essentially the same obligations in either case. The IOUs help GE's accountants track how much money each division is spending on advertising, so they can charge each division appropriately for the advertising (pay the IOUs).
The advertising department is GE's left pocket. The washing machine division is GE's right pocket. What's the problem with GE transferring money from its right pocket to its left pocket?
The Social Security trust fund is an intergenerational transfer. The government provides free education for children, which is a transfer from the old (the left pocket) to the young (the right pocket). Social Security is a transfer from the young (the right pocket) to the old (the left pocket).
Social Security is also a transfer to young people with elderly parents. Having to care for elderly parents can be a great burden, and before Social Security, it was even worse. Even today, people caring for elderly parents can have their savings (and inheritance) wiped out. Social Security cushions you against that risk. So you don't have the burden of caring for your parents who invested with Bernie Madoff. Social
You claim that the IOU amounts to savings, because it is owed to you, but omit the fact that it's also a debt because you are the one liable for payment of that IOU. So the books say you have a dollar, but when the time comes to pay, you have to come up with money from somewhere else in order to actually make good.
It's not a savings, it's a generational transfer fund with some components of savings.
They don't need savings at all, but some people want to pay now rather than later. The Republicans under Ronald Reagan insisted on putting (some of) it in a lockbox, so we put it in a lockbox.
Do you want the Social Security Administration to take everybody's FICA payments and put them in a vault, like Scrooge McDuck's money bin? As accountants realized in the renaissance, instead of leaving the money in a vault, you can use it for safe investments. Having one government department lending money to another, as private companies like GE do, is one of the safest investments they can get. Rather than selling Treasury bonds to the Chinese, they sell Treasury bonds to the Social Security trust fund.
The US is living beyond its means. Eventually, something has to give. Politicians rarely get elected by telling the truth though, since the average voter is too stupid to be able to handle it readily. They just get mad and throw gasoline onto the fire that is current partisan politics.
The US
Paul Krugman is a Nobel prize-winning economist and an economics professor at Princeton. You ought to consider the possibility that he understands this better than you do.
Don't you realize? No-one under 30 expects to see anything from it. To them it's just another tax with no hope of return.
That's because the Republicans and their right-wing think tanks have conned them in to believing this nonsense.
A bunch of billionaires don't want to pay taxes so they're coming up with this con to convince *everybody* not to pay taxes -- and lose the benefits of government. The Koch brothers on their guarded estates don't need government, but the rest of us do.
If they can convince enough of you, it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Given that, make it official - declare we are paying in to help those in the system now, but it ends with them and we start doing something sane where we sock away money per person, for that person-
Yes, that's step 2 of the Republican plan -- convince you that Social Security will never pay out, so we should destroy it.
You can't buy an annuity on the free market that will pay as well as Social Security. Overall, people can't invest their money in the free market as safely as they can invest in Social Security. Look at all the people who lost their life savings in the technology bubble. Look at all the people who lost their life savings in the real estate bubble. Look at the people who lost half their life savings in the stock market crash, even when they invested in the safest stocks.
Do you think you're smarter than them?
Why don't you put your life savings in your back pocket, fly to Monaco, go to the roulette wheel, and put everything on black? That's what you want us all to do. Under some scenarios, people will do better in a no-load mutual fund, but under other (real) scenarios, they'll lose their shirt. It's even riskier if you try to beat the no-load mutual funds, and try to be clever.
with some extra taken to help the truly needy.
Look at the way these same conservatives are cutting taxes and the social safety net to help the "truly needy". Instead of getting Social Security as a right, you want a government bureaucrat to decide whether we're "truly needy".
Anyone up for retirement more than ten years out better have arranged their own finances.
Although I enjoy cranky anti-government fantasies too, it's better to stay closer to reality. The Republicans are beating this anti-Social Security line because they want to say, "Social Security isn't going to be there for you, so let's end it and save you all those tax deductions" (which are the lowest in the developed world).
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/cockroach-ideas/
Conscience of a Liberal
Cockroach Ideas
By PAUL KRUGMAN
March 13, 2011, 12:57 pm
“the Social Security trust fund doesn’t exist”
If Ronald Reagan had said, back in the 1980s, “Let’s increase a regressive tax that falls mainly on the working class, while cutting taxes that fall mainly on much richer people,” he would have faced a political firestorm. But because the increase in the regressive payroll tax was recommended by the Greenspan Commission to support Social Security, it was politically in a different box – you might even call it a lockbox – from Reagan’s tax cuts.
Their answer to the pretty good numbers is to say that the trust fund is meaningless, because it’s invested in U.S. government bonds. They aren’t really saying that government bonds are worthless; their point is that the whole notion of a separate budget for Social Security is a fiction.
But there are two problems with their position.
The lesser problem is that if you say that there is no link between the payroll tax and future Social Security benefits – which is what denying the reality of the trust fund amounts to – then Greenspan and company pulled a fast one back in the 1980s: they sold a regressive tax switch, raising taxes on workers while cutting them on the wealthy, on false pretenses. More broadly, we’re breaking a major promise if we now, after 20 years of high payroll taxes to pay for Social Security’s future, declare that it was all a little joke on the public.
The bigger problem for those who want to see a crisis in Social Security’s future is this: if Social Security is just part of the federal budget, with no budget or trust fund of its own, then, well, it’s just part of the federal budget: there can’t be a Social Security crisis.
No, those British lawyers know how to cross-examine somebody and pin them down.
They were on their high school debating teams.
Didn't you see A Fish Named Wanda?
Actually, humans and many other animals evolved with a strong commitment to fairness.
Do a Google search for "evolution of cooperation".
In experimental settings, like variations of the prisoner's dilemma, people will refuse choices where they will get greater rewards in favor of choices that they fell is fair.
For example, if you got $100 to divide, and you took $90 for yourself and offered $10 to me, and I could (1) accept it, or (2) reject it and have neither of us get anything, most people would reject it.
And if you're acting like a freeloader while the rest of us are trying to cooperate, most people would pay money to make you suffer a penalty.
it's still true that dead people do vote in Chicago.
I call bullshit. Do you have a citation?
George W. Bush really needed you when he was trying to find one.
Yeah, but look at the documentation you need to get a Texas a Non-Driver Identification Card. http://www.txdps.state.tx.us/DriverLicense/identificationrequirements.htm
Primary identification
Must include full name, date of birth, and photo
You need a *driver's license* to get a non-driver's ID. Either that or a current passport or military ID, or non-citizen IDs.
I couldn't get this non-driver's ID in Texas without using my current driver's license. I don't even have a current passport (which cost over $100). To get a passport, I needed -- a driver's license.
This is like the "turtles all the way down" joke.
That is interesting.
The US and the UK have a similar legal system with different actors.
I don't think the US Supreme Court would accept that standard for criminal liability of directors.
In US criminal trials, the prosecutors are always looking for emails or wiretaps that would prove the higher-ups had specific knowledge.
In Connick v. Thompson, the US Supreme Court just reversed a lower court decision, http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2011/03/us_supreme_court_rejects_14_mi.html that held the New Orleans prosecutor civilly liable for withholding evidence in a case that sent an innocent man to jail for 18 years, including 14 years on death row. That was a civil case, not a criminal case, so Thompson had to meet an even lower standard of evidence.
As I understand it, the lower-level prosecutors who withhold evidence are committing perjury, and I think they should be disbarred and sent to jail. I can't think of a case in which it's happened.
I think the major problem that Smith identifies is that Murdoch has leveraged his media empire for political influence, which he then uses to break the law with impunity. In the US, it's fairly easy for a manager to insulate himself from criminal charges through subordinates. He may not be able to get away with that in the UK.
Brooks is in a difficult position.
(1) If she didn't know about the phone hacking, then she was printing stuff in her paper without knowing the sources, and she was incompetent. (Didn't Ben Bradley, the editor of the Washington Post, know the identity of Deep Throat?)
(2) If she did know about the phone hacking then she was committing a crime.
I hope she'll be testifying under oath soon. Wonder what she'll say.
Actually, most of the worlds scientific research doesn't come from the US
I was wondering about that.
We have a lot of US exceptionalists who claim that most of the research *does* come from the US. It sounds like BS but OTOH the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health do fund a lot of research. And there's lots of military research. I'd like to have something to come back at them with.
Do you have any numbers to support that claim? It should be true, but I'd like to be able to document it.
After all, most of the world's military spending does come from the US.
One of the largest (in more ways than one) academic publisher was Robert Maxwell, http://www.sportaphile.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/scrooge-mcduck-make-it-rain.jpg who earned the emnity of a lot of academics by saying that they're printing money because he can charge whatever he wants and people *have* to buy them.
There were obscure neurology and other journals that researchers in the field had to have, and subscription prices were going up to $2,000 a year (and they may still be there). They do go through an editorial process of peer review and editorials, and they do print some high-quality photos and illustrations. But the important editorial work is done free.
This isn't brain surgery. The clerical work can be done by the department secretary. The subscribers finally decided they could do it cheaper themselves, especially after the Internet, and started publishing open-source journals, like PLoS. There are expenses that somebody has to pay, but it's cheaper for the authors to pay page fees up front than for the same authors (as subscribers) to pay huge subscription fees.
There are lots of new small book publishers who use print-on-demand technology and outlets like Amazon.com to go around the traditional publishers.
You've given me an idea now. I know lots of freelancers who work for those same academic presses. If you have a small budget, you could hire an extra administrative assistant and some freelancers to put out your own journal directly. It's not trivial, but it's a lot cheaper.
Taxpayer funded research should not be behind pay walls or restricted in any other manner. Exception for information with military applications...mostly.
Can somebody who follows this more closely help me with this?
The National Library of Medicine compiled an internal database of almost every significant medical journal article. With encouragement from Al Gore, they made it free on the Internet as PubMed (on the theory that the public should have free access to the product of tax-funded work). http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed
Either the NLM or another government agency also created a database of articles about chemistry. They also wanted to make it public. However, the American Chemical Society was producing a proprietary database, which it licensed very profitably, which did the same thing, and the free government database would have replaced it. The ACS successfully lobbied the government to prevent the agency from making this database free to the public like PubMed.
Is this correct? Is this the same database?
Indeed, but the salient point is really why government grants are being used for research which isn't available for free to the taxpayers.
The Bayh-Dole Act. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act
I can't explain this any more to you.
If you want to understand this issue, you have to put aside your preconceptions and do some reading in reliable sources like the NEJM.
Like most conservatives today, you don't seem to be willing to do that.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2077943,00.html
You don't have enough background in health care to understand this.
You're making assumptions based on your beliefs about the way the market and the health care segment of the economy works, and you're ignoring the facts about way it actually works. You are indeed like the Austrian economists, who follow theory and ignore empirical evidence.
You're just speculating about guidelines. You don't understand how they work. Doctors are well aware of conflicts of interest, and they've developed procedures to avoid or cancel out conflicts of interest.
I read many guidelines and talked to the doctors who wrote them. I've been to medical meetings where they debated guidelines. You've probably never read a medical guideline. You don't know the facts.
Despite your speculations and assumptions, the UK NICE, US government agencies, government health care systems around the world, independent organizations like the Cochrane Collaboration, private insurance companies, and professional societies usually agree on the same guidelines. The guidelines don't simply promote their own financial interest. If they do, doctors recognize it and ignore them.
Everybody knows that patients die in the end. You're giving platitudes as if you had discovered a new idea. The issue is how long they will live, under what conditions, and how much it will cost. There are good answers to these questions and they're not the answers you think.
It's not true that people want to live forever with unlimited health care. I wonder whether you actually know people in their 60s, 70s and 80s. Elderly people have the experience of death and sickness all around them -- that is, unlike you they know what the facts are, and they know what medical care can and can't do. Elderly people usually say that they want to live with as much independence as possible. They want to live without pain. They want to avoid unnecessary medical procedures. They know they're going to die soon and aggressive medical care in people their age usually does more harm than good. It's not a free market in which the more you spend the longer you live.
Scientists often say that the important results are the ones that go against intuition and conventional wisdom. You're just following your own intuition and conventional wisdom. Things *seem* obvious to you, but they've been studied and disproven in well-designed research.
I can't give you a tutorial on health care economics, especially since your mind is made up and when somebody gives you the facts you just come up with excuses to reject them. You're not willing to put aside your preconceptions and do the hard work.
If you want to understand this subject, the best way to start is probably to read the articles on health care policy in the New England Journal of Medicine, some of which are free online at www.nejm.org. Paul Krugman has probably written the best explanations of the economics of health care, but you're probably going to reject him out of hand.
There are many obscure diseases and sometimes it can be almost impossible for the best specialists to diagnose them in the best hospitals.
I assume you've taken your mother to one of the best academic hospitals in your area. It's worth spending the effort on a good diagnosis, if that can keep her out of a nursing home. But if you've done that, then you've done all you can do. Sometimes they just can't find the cause.
In medicine doctors throughout the developed world have a generally agreed upon standard of care. They're called guidelines. Even the private insurance companies agree on them.
Some procedures are cost-beneficial. If they can save the life of a 4-year-old girl for $100,000 (with leukemia, for example) they do it. In the UK, they'll spend $50,000 (sometimes more) to save a human life. They don't determine the value of a human life on the free market.
Medical care is not like other goods or services. Most people want a system in which everybody gets at least that established standard of care.
Whatever you believe, the overwhelming majority of people in this country, and most developed countries, are not willing to let people die if they can't afford standard health care. They're not willing to let a 4-year-old girl die unnecessarily if she could be saved for $100,000. Are you? The only way they can do that reliably is through the government.
By "working" I mean a system that can provide that standard care to the overwhelming majority of the country's residents. Nobody has been able to provide care for the poor through the free market.
In medicine doctors throughout the developed world have a generally agreed upon standard of care. They're called guidelines. Even the private insurance companies agree on them.
Some procedures are cost-beneficial. If they can save the life of a 4-year-old girl for $100,000 (with leukemia, for example) they do it. In the UK, they'll spend $50,000 (sometimes more) to save a human life. They don't determine the value of a human life on the basis of what people are willing to pay to save their lives on the free market.
Medical care is not like other goods or services. It's not like the market for food in which some people choose to get steak and other people get hamburger. Most people want a system in which everybody gets at least that established standard of care.
Whatever you believe, the overwhelming majority of people in this country, and most developed countries, are not willing to let people die if they can't afford standard health care. They're not willing to let a 4-year-old girl die unnecessarily if she could be saved for $100,000. They consider that to be a legitimate function of government. That's what most people want, and if you want to live in a democracy you have to go along with that value judgment. The only way they can save people like that reliably is through the government.
By "working" I mean a system that can provide that standard care to the overwhelming majority of the country's residents. Nobody has been able to provide care for the poor through the free market.
Obamacare is indeed a vast subsidy system for the private insurance system. It's not a single payer system.
Doctors and health policy analysts around the world love to compare health care systems, and there's a lot of data on the differences between them.
I'll compare the Canadian vs. U.S. health care system, because I know a lot about that. Most people who have studied it say that U.S. care is more expensive than Canadian care because of (1) the private insurance system, which adds administrative complexity and cost (2) greater use of technology like CAT and MRI scans in the U.S. (These scans are actually overused in the US. Experts say unnecessary CAT scans cause a significant increase in cancer, and unnecessary MRIs sometimes cause irreversible kidney failure, because some people are sensitive to the gadolinium contrast dye) (3) overtreatment generally, such as unnecessary drugs and surgery (4) higher salaries for specialists (5) higher prices for drugs. The VA system negotiates for lower prices, but Medicare by law isn't allowed to negotiate. That's about 90% of the difference between the U.S. and Canada.
A majority of Americans say on polls that they would prefer "Medicare for all." Their politicians "can't" give them that because they get contributions from the insurance industry and just plain side with the insurance industry. But if we had a government whose politicians followed the wishes of its voters, there's no economic or technical reason why we couldn't have a Canadian-style system.
If you believe in empirical evidence, compare the different health care systems worldwide, as the doctors and health care economists do. The most expensive is the U.S. The other system with the greatest free market component is the Swiss system, and they're the *second* most expensive system in the world. (Swiss insurance companies are much more heavily regulated, which is why they're cheaper.) The government-run health care systems cost about half as much as ours or less.
Doctors measure outcomes very carefully, because they want to know which procedures are working. The outcomes are about the same in all developed countries.
I don't know of a single developed country in the world with what you would call a "free market" health care system. It's never worked. Countries that tried it, like Singapore, had problems and moved to more of a government-run system.
In a free market, if your 5-year-old daughter has leukemia, and you can afford to pay for her treatment, she'll live, and if you can't afford it, she'll die. People won't accept that.
While we are at it, the federal government is more efficient the private industry almost all the time.
I don't understand why people make this claim, but I see it over and over again. There are several things to remember that completely undermine this. First, government doesn't have to provide a positive return on investment. A business has to make a profit in order to continue to exist, a government agency or regulation does not.
Why is it desirable that an operation provides a positive return on its investment? For most government services, it isn't. How can the police, court system, primary school system, and health care system turn a profit? Do you want the police to charge victims a fee before they investigate a crime? Do you want to limit elementary and high school education only to those who can afford it? Are you going to limit health care to those who "create value" and let the others die if they get multiple sclerosis or leukemia and can't afford to pay for the health care they need to save their lives?
I looked up von Mises in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_school and I was suprised to see that the Austrian economists don't believe in empirical evidence. If you don't either, then there's no point in reading further, because this won't make any sense to you.
But the facts are that despite whatever your theory predicts, there are many services that the government can provide far more cheaply and efficiently than private enterprise.
The best example is health care. The Canadian health care system costs about half as much per capita as ours, and the outcomes are about as good (sometimes better). http://www.openmedicine.ca/article/view/8/1 If Americans could buy health care at the price, quality and service of Canadian care, it would be the most popular health insurance in the U.S.
Paul Krugman has provided lots of good arguments and data to show that government does a better job of providing health care than the private sector. One example is Medicare advantage. When the private insurance sector started to manage Medicare, they said they would save money. They now say that they can't continue to manage Medicare without a 15% premium over what government Medicare costs. Those are the facts. Of course if you don't believe in empirical facts, that won't convince you.
In health care, the problem with the free market, is that it's administratively more complex, which makes it more expensive. Unlike Medicare, private insurance companies have an army of clerks to figure out their contract arrangements with each patient and doctor. For these administrative costs, they charge you at least 15% of your premium dollar (and some of them complained because they couldn't charge 45% of the premium dollar). Medicare charges 2-3%.
Doctors complained in a recent article in JAMA that dealing with private insurance companies is the most stressful part of their job. Doctors spend about 15% of their staff time administering private insurance payments.
So after the insurance company takes 15 cents of your health care premium dollar in administrative costs, your doctor has to take another 15 cents to administer his insurance payments.
Bottom line: Government delivers health care more efficiently, at lower cost, and equal quality, than the private market. Ayn Rand was wrong.