Except, other than EPA, there's no reason to have all of those at the federal level.
There's every reason. Large portions of this country would be third world shitholes without services provided for (or mandated by) the federal government. That and the fact that General Welfare is mentioned in the Constitution.
Now let's figure out what we'd like to cut from Government.
Now lets remember that socialized medicine provides better outcomes for a fraction of the cost of a for-profit, health insurance based system. Ditching pharma, insurance, and for-profit hospitals would be a huge cost savings to the public. Most of the rest the Concerns you mentioned can be answered by that simple fact.
That's part of the constitutionally limited responsibilities (CLR). That's roughly half of discretionary spending (about $600 billion).
This isn't defense, it's Empire. And your figure is off by more than half.
You do realize that the line right there was made possible by government, right? There are competitors who make them and sell them for much cheaper on the international market, but the government, the one you're saying would make everything better, has banned them from being allowed to be sold in this country.
You do realize that was made possible by corporate lobbying, right? You're not even the first bootlicker in this thread to take a problem caused by the institution of capitalism and blame it on the institution of government.
You think there is a lack of government? I think there is too much. Especially regarding the federal government.
Then you're another Randian who's completely lost touch with reality. Socialized medicine produces better outcomes for a fraction of the cost, and that's just a fact you're going to have to deal with.
Build your nirvana; your ideal state.
Can't. Do to folks who love themselves some corporate corruption - like yourself and our current president - states can't yet pass their own single-payer programs, as they were banned for seven years by Obomneycare. And even after that, they will require a waver from the HHS secretary - good luck getting that from either a Trump or Hillary nominee for the agency.
For the sake of comparison, though, we don't have to wait for the ideal Randian state to be created, as that's already happened.
It's not lack of government that caused the problem
Yeah. It is. The lack of government means drugs are developed by corporations, rather than the people. It's the lack of government regulations that allows companies to charge whatever the hell they want for drugs that were frequently developed on the taxpayer's dime to start with, at public universities.
it's government regulation that prevents competitors from selling in the US.
Regulations paid for by corporations.
What do you call "campaign finance contributions"? Or "lobbying"?
Corruption. Right-wingers love to complain about communism decades after the fall of the USSR, but the worst bureaucrat at the worst Soviet agency didn't have a personal incentive to screw over the public the way officials in the U.S. do, because he couldn't look forward to a seven figure job lobbying for the same interests he had been regulating before his "retirement".
What makes you think those nations are comparable?
Uhhhh the fact that they're first world, western democracies that have better health care outcomes than the United States at a fraction of the cost?
No more than your local PD/FD are socialized crime/fire insurance. In civilized countries, those plus medical care are simply government-provided services, no insurance involved.
re importing would make it reeeeealy easy to replace with cheap ass counterfeits, fakes, and ol' switcharoos.
True
Not so much true, as Pharma fear-mongering. We aren't talking about ordering drugs from Super Legit Pharmaceuticals, with an address in some parent's basement in Syria, but from Canada, Australia, France etc. Countries that have better health care outcomes at a fraction of the cost - partly because they regulate their drug costs.
With that are extraordinary costs for insurance due to malpractice, wrongful death lawsuits, etc... The doctor may only see $60 per hour, but the amount of insurance that comes with every surgery is immense. With the U.S. being so litigation happy, it's no wonder we see $4k for one hour in the E.R.
That's the myth. The reality is that only a fraction of malpractice cases make it to court, and only a fraction of those see any meaningful reward to the victim. As proven by the fact that doctors in states with "tort reform" pay the same rates as doctors in states that haven't.
A friend of mine once complained to me that treating Medicare patients cost her money, given the costs she had to pay for supplies, nurses, etc., not even counting money for her. She may not have been operating a cost-efficient practice (I have much more confidence in her as a surgeon than her as a businessperson), but I doubt she was way far out of line.
Sounds more like her "cost" was opportunity cost: she wasn't able to overbill Medicare for the same procedure as she would have been able to do to Wellpoint, Blue Cross et all, so the patient "cost" her money.
You do realize that really means the U.S. is subsidizing the cost of the drug for those other countries, right?
Except they're not. Most pharma prices in the U.S. have nothing to do with the cost of R & D, and everything to do with advertising costs and quarterly profits. Selling that cancer drug to Africa for pennies on the American dollar isn't largess on their part, it's charging what the market will bear.
That is all good in theory. If you assume that there is no corruption in government.
As long as you ignore the infinitely greater corruption in business, and business-owned politicians.
The people who don't want a single payer system don't fear socialized whatever.
Tell that to the Randians, Birchers and Teabaggers that make up half this site's readership.
They fear too much government control.
More than corporate price gouging? Then those people are morans. The worst bureaucrat at the worst agency in the old Soviet Union did not have a personal incentive to screw over the public - as opposed to every corporate executive and board member.
There are things the everyday person can do to try to get it fixed. But if a fiasco like this were to happen with a government-controlled single-payer system, there is nothing the everyday person can do to fix it.
Which is as much of a threat of your typical terrorist threat on 24: a non-existent non-possibility thought up by bedwetting right-wingers.
As for the "it works in other countries" argument, yes it does, at the cost of a slowed rate of technological progress.
Tell that to poor-as-hell Cuba, that fielded more doctors to fight Ebola than the United States, and who developed a vaccine for lung cancer. The progress you refer to isn't technological, but the progress in corporate graft and rent-seeking. Not to mention the fact that those countries have better health care outcomes at a fraction of the cost.
GSM was the de facto government-approved world standard for cell phone service
Easy counterpoint: HDTV's. Americans could have had them 10-15 years sooner, if the USG had cracked some heads and mandated a standard. Instead of the slow rollout we had, where consumers wouldn't touch 40 different standards for an expensive piece of technology, least the one they invested wasn't the eventual market winner. And companies produced newer TV sets at a glacial pace, knowing that they could only count on rich early adopters to buy their products.
The trouble is, a good deal of the price gouging we see in the United States, is a result of the pharmaceutical industry trying to subsidize the low prices in other countries.
Out of the goodness of their non-existent philanthropic hearts?
Except those countries aren't the ones making medical advancements. Places like the US are.
Tell that to poor-as-fuck Cuba, that made a vaccine for lung cancer. The treatments produced by American pharmaceuticals are dwarfed by the profits generated by American pharmaceuticals...but you knew this already.
As opposed to your mendacity and cherry picking? Warmer temperatures means more moisture in the air, which makes for more precipitation, which makes for more rain and...snow. You and every other denialist who looks at snow and says it's dispositive of climate change is actually pointing to one of it's effects.
The weird thing is, pharmaceutical companies don't make money consistently more than car companies, food companies, electronics companies, software companies, or any other kind of company. They simply aren't making the ton of money we'd like to complain about. This makes sense, because if drug research, development, and production DID make more money than doing something else, then Apple, Google, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos would invest their money into new pharmaceutical companies, so that they would make a ton more money.
1) Buying an Android smartphone or ordering something from Amazon is a choice. Needing treatment for a medical condition is not.
2) There is competition in the tech world. Don't want that Android? Buy an iPhone. Don't want to order from Amazon? Wal-Mart ships all kinds of things online. The cancer treatment that will save your life is patented by one company? You're fucked if your insurance company isn't willing to fork over six figures for one year's treatment.
3) Tech companies, like pharma, pay their top executives obscene salaries and spend great sums on marketing. What they don't do is have anything close to the incestious relationship Pharma has with public universities, by which they take taxpayer-funded research, patent it, and then fuck the taxpayer sideways on the drugs she paid to develop.
4) Software companies haven't gotten laws passed to explicitly prevent the government from negotiating on software prices, nor on banning the importation of their products (thought they might not be happy about it).
1. Slow population growth, especially in Africa. Make sure everyone that wants contraception has it.
Smarmy western elitism + eugenics, charming. Problem: your self-centered ass uses the same amount of resources as 32 of those Africans that you wish would stop breeding.
anti-nuke hysteria, fanned by the cold war and the Chernobyl disaster, and promoted in the press by pro-oil interests, resulted in the US putting a moratorium on the construction of additional nuclear power stations, and the increased buildout of coal and petroleum fired power plants.
Bullshit. This is the same USG that is happy to tell both the citizen and the consumer to go fuck themselves if it means some corporation can get a buck. Or have you paid no attention to coal ash spills, oil train fires, pipelines that leak hundreds of thousands of gallons of petroleum tinto the surrounding land? The real reason you haven't had new nuclear plants built is they are completely unjustifiable, and cannot exist without massive subsidies from the taxpayer.
Safety: even assuming there will never be another Chernobyl or Fukishima, you still have to store that waste for thousands of years.
Cost: the real achilles heel for nuclear power. You simply cannot justify building nuclear power plants when other sources of energy (wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, sugar cane ethanol) can be rolled out far more quickly, far more safely, for a fraction of the cost.
Disagree? Then feel free to name the nuclear plants that roll the full cost of mining, refinement, security, safety, and storing it's waste for thousands of years into the rates charged to customers.
AGW minimization is a reason FOR building more nukes.
Uh, no, it's not. Not even close, as nuclear power simply is not cost effective compared to other renewable power sources, which have none of the safety issues and don't take a decade to build.
The argument that Nuclear is completely unsafe when looking at the plants in operation today is kind of like arguing that cars are horribly unsafe because the study only looked at vehicles in Cuba (i.e. mostly all from the 50's).
But to get your investment in plant infrastructure back you half to run them for that length of time. And that's ignoring the subsidized costs of plant safety, plant security, and storing the waste for thousands of years.
For example, molten salt reactors can be designed to eliminate the possibility of a meltdown, even in the conditions that happened in Japan.
Which is:
1) Vaporware, same as thorium reactors 2) Far more expensive than renewable energy
When it's cheaper to bring sugar cane-based ethanol to that remote Eskimo village by dogsled than it is to build one of these mythical reactors, why bother? That's the real achilles heel of nuclear power: cost. You can roll out renewable energy sources faster, more safely, for less money. Nuclear power is pure corporate welfare, as it cannot exist or compete without taxpayer support.
Dude. If someone want to shake up education to try something new, and wants to give a boat load of money - what's not to love?
... and if they team up with some billionaires, it means their effort is more likely to be successful, and more likely to make a difference.
A difference in de-professionalizing education and bringing teachers to the same level as barista's at Starbucks. A difference in funneling hundreds of billions in public dollars into the blood funnels of the leisure class, because already being more rich than 90% of the population combined just isn't enough for them.
This isn't something to be commended. This is a reason to break the guillotines out of storage.
Besides, have you Randian's thought about what will happen when unions are utterly crushed and every elementary school has quarterly revenue targets? What happens when the school turns a total blind eye to the constant bullying of your (naturally brilliant and hard working) John Galt Jr. because the bully's dad is a partner on the school board?
Why is that? Because billionaires are infallible?
They tend to be less fallible than non-billionaires. Bill and Mark didn't get to be billionaires by winning the lottery. They made some smart decisions, hired good people, and built successful organizations. Also, they have a lot of money, and that can sometimes help make projects successful
Bill was in the right place at the right time through pure dumb luck, created & abused a monopoly to push out the competition, and got his start through his momma's business connections. Jobs had three great runs (first and second stints at Apple, Pixar) but he is the incredibly rare exception, not the obnoxiously elitist rule.
Actually, I think a bunch of religious fanatics are responsible for ISIS.
Actually that's continuing to stick fingers in the ears. Who armed those religious fanatics? The United States. Who's the greatest recruiter for religious extremists? The U.S. military, when it bombs weddings and funerals and schools and markets and apartments and hospitals. Who's ensured that more countries are run by religious extremists? The United States, when it props up the most repressive government in the world, Saudi Arabia. The United States, when it overthrows secular governments in Afghanistan and Iran and Libya and Iraq and Syria (work in progress).
Okay, put up or shut up. Name one person who negligently got small amounts of classified data where it shouldn't be and faced serious criminal prosecution.
On what planet is Hillary's email server "small"? In order of proportion, you're comparing an anthill (sailor's cell phone) to Mt. Everest. With Mt. McKinley parked on top it (HRC's email server). Sandy Berger, by comparison, had a literal handful of documents (he had them in his pants pockets) and pled to 2 years probation, a $50,000 fine, and the loss of his security clearance and law license.
Do tell us how this election would go if Hillary was entering the debates with Trump on probation, disbarred, and without a security clearance for the first three years of her presidency. Oh, and part of the reason Berger was prosecuted? He destroyed the classified material he had. How many emails did Hillary delete from her server? Over 30,000. Sure, she claims those were personal, but she also claimed that none of them were marked classified at the time (pure mendacity as that information is inherently classified) but lied about that too.
Anyone else, the charges would include Obstruction of Justice, in addition to mishandling classified evidence.
The sailor deliberately took pictures of the submarine. This isn't negligence. This was a deliberate action, and presumably known to be illegal at the time.
Yes, taking pictures on his phone was a deliberate act. Setting up a private, unsecured, unauthorized email server to run 100% of your highly classified email communications was also a deliberate act. How much power does a cognitive dissonance generator require to ignore the parallels and the scale involved? Is it powered by a fusion reactor?
Deliberately put classified material where it doesn't belong and you get seriously prosecuted. Do that negligently and you aren't.
Nope. Going back to the sailor again, even the the DOJ prosecutors agree that he had no intent to distribute the pictures. Because intent is irrelevant in the government's eyes, only the action matters. The act of mishandling classified evidence. Just ask any whisteblower to face the DOJ's wrath, like John Kiriakou. The only person to go to prison for the CIA's brutal torture program....is the man who revealed it's existence.
If you can't find something stupid said by anybody in that list in 3 seconds of Google, I can't help you.
You're too stupid to help anyone. It's the job of the person making the assertion to back it up. Don't think so? Then I causally assert that Trailer Trash likes to have sex with pigs in the mud, and leave you to disprove that assertion.
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There's every reason. Large portions of this country would be third world shitholes without services provided for (or mandated by) the federal government. That and the fact that General Welfare is mentioned in the Constitution.
Twice.
Now lets remember that socialized medicine provides better outcomes for a fraction of the cost of a for-profit, health insurance based system. Ditching pharma, insurance, and for-profit hospitals would be a huge cost savings to the public. Most of the rest the Concerns you mentioned can be answered by that simple fact.
This isn't defense, it's Empire. And your figure is off by more than half.
You do realize that was made possible by corporate lobbying, right? You're not even the first bootlicker in this thread to take a problem caused by the institution of capitalism and blame it on the institution of government.
Then you're another Randian who's completely lost touch with reality. Socialized medicine produces better outcomes for a fraction of the cost, and that's just a fact you're going to have to deal with.
Can't. Do to folks who love themselves some corporate corruption - like yourself and our current president - states can't yet pass their own single-payer programs, as they were banned for seven years by Obomneycare. And even after that, they will require a waver from the HHS secretary - good luck getting that from either a Trump or Hillary nominee for the agency.
For the sake of comparison, though, we don't have to wait for the ideal Randian state to be created, as that's already happened.
Yeah. It is. The lack of government means drugs are developed by corporations, rather than the people. It's the lack of government regulations that allows companies to charge whatever the hell they want for drugs that were frequently developed on the taxpayer's dime to start with, at public universities.
Regulations paid for by corporations.
Corruption. Right-wingers love to complain about communism decades after the fall of the USSR, but the worst bureaucrat at the worst Soviet agency didn't have a personal incentive to screw over the public the way officials in the U.S. do, because he couldn't look forward to a seven figure job lobbying for the same interests he had been regulating before his "retirement".
Uhhhh the fact that they're first world, western democracies that have better health care outcomes than the United States at a fraction of the cost?
No more than your local PD/FD are socialized crime/fire insurance. In civilized countries, those plus medical care are simply government-provided services, no insurance involved.
Not so much true, as Pharma fear-mongering. We aren't talking about ordering drugs from Super Legit Pharmaceuticals, with an address in some parent's basement in Syria, but from Canada, Australia, France etc. Countries that have better health care outcomes at a fraction of the cost - partly because they regulate their drug costs.
That's the myth. The reality is that only a fraction of malpractice cases make it to court, and only a fraction of those see any meaningful reward to the victim. As proven by the fact that doctors in states with "tort reform" pay the same rates as doctors in states that haven't.
Sounds more like her "cost" was opportunity cost: she wasn't able to overbill Medicare for the same procedure as she would have been able to do to Wellpoint, Blue Cross et all, so the patient "cost" her money.
Did you intentionally mention the crux of the issue, or was that by accident?
Except they're not. Most pharma prices in the U.S. have nothing to do with the cost of R & D, and everything to do with advertising costs and quarterly profits. Selling that cancer drug to Africa for pennies on the American dollar isn't largess on their part, it's charging what the market will bear.
As long as you ignore the infinitely greater corruption in business, and business-owned politicians.
Tell that to the Randians, Birchers and Teabaggers that make up half this site's readership.
More than corporate price gouging? Then those people are morans. The worst bureaucrat at the worst agency in the old Soviet Union did not have a personal incentive to screw over the public - as opposed to every corporate executive and board member.
Which is as much of a threat of your typical terrorist threat on 24: a non-existent non-possibility thought up by bedwetting right-wingers.
Tell that to poor-as-hell Cuba, that fielded more doctors to fight Ebola than the United States, and who developed a vaccine for lung cancer. The progress you refer to isn't technological, but the progress in corporate graft and rent-seeking. Not to mention the fact that those countries have better health care outcomes at a fraction of the cost.
Easy counterpoint: HDTV's. Americans could have had them 10-15 years sooner, if the USG had cracked some heads and mandated a standard. Instead of the slow rollout we had, where consumers wouldn't touch 40 different standards for an expensive piece of technology, least the one they invested wasn't the eventual market winner. And companies produced newer TV sets at a glacial pace, knowing that they could only count on rich early adopters to buy their products.
Out of the goodness of their non-existent philanthropic hearts?
Tell that to poor-as-fuck Cuba, that made a vaccine for lung cancer. The treatments produced by American pharmaceuticals are dwarfed by the profits generated by American pharmaceuticals...but you knew this already.
As opposed to your mendacity and cherry picking? Warmer temperatures means more moisture in the air, which makes for more precipitation, which makes for more rain and...snow. You and every other denialist who looks at snow and says it's dispositive of climate change is actually pointing to one of it's effects.
1) Buying an Android smartphone or ordering something from Amazon is a choice. Needing treatment for a medical condition is not.
2) There is competition in the tech world. Don't want that Android? Buy an iPhone. Don't want to order from Amazon? Wal-Mart ships all kinds of things online. The cancer treatment that will save your life is patented by one company? You're fucked if your insurance company isn't willing to fork over six figures for one year's treatment.
3) Tech companies, like pharma, pay their top executives obscene salaries and spend great sums on marketing. What they don't do is have anything close to the incestious relationship Pharma has with public universities, by which they take taxpayer-funded research, patent it, and then fuck the taxpayer sideways on the drugs she paid to develop.
4) Software companies haven't gotten laws passed to explicitly prevent the government from negotiating on software prices, nor on banning the importation of their products (thought they might not be happy about it).
Smarmy western elitism + eugenics, charming. Problem: your self-centered ass uses the same amount of resources as 32 of those Africans that you wish would stop breeding.
Bullshit. This is the same USG that is happy to tell both the citizen and the consumer to go fuck themselves if it means some corporation can get a buck. Or have you paid no attention to coal ash spills, oil train fires, pipelines that leak hundreds of thousands of gallons of petroleum tinto the surrounding land? The real reason you haven't had new nuclear plants built is they are completely unjustifiable, and cannot exist without massive subsidies from the taxpayer.
Safety: even assuming there will never be another Chernobyl or Fukishima, you still have to store that waste for thousands of years.
Cost: the real achilles heel for nuclear power. You simply cannot justify building nuclear power plants when other sources of energy (wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, sugar cane ethanol) can be rolled out far more quickly, far more safely, for a fraction of the cost.
Disagree? Then feel free to name the nuclear plants that roll the full cost of mining, refinement, security, safety, and storing it's waste for thousands of years into the rates charged to customers.
Uh, no, it's not. Not even close, as nuclear power simply is not cost effective compared to other renewable power sources, which have none of the safety issues and don't take a decade to build.
But to get your investment in plant infrastructure back you half to run them for that length of time. And that's ignoring the subsidized costs of plant safety, plant security, and storing the waste for thousands of years.
Which is:
1) Vaporware, same as thorium reactors
2) Far more expensive than renewable energy
When it's cheaper to bring sugar cane-based ethanol to that remote Eskimo village by dogsled than it is to build one of these mythical reactors, why bother? That's the real achilles heel of nuclear power: cost. You can roll out renewable energy sources faster, more safely, for less money. Nuclear power is pure corporate welfare, as it cannot exist or compete without taxpayer support.
Of course the announcement would come from them.
The KKK has different ideas from me, too. Guess what they are? Bigots, you fuckwit.
A difference in de-professionalizing education and bringing teachers to the same level as barista's at Starbucks. A difference in funneling hundreds of billions in public dollars into the blood funnels of the leisure class, because already being more rich than 90% of the population combined just isn't enough for them.
This isn't something to be commended. This is a reason to break the guillotines out of storage.
Besides, have you Randian's thought about what will happen when unions are utterly crushed and every elementary school has quarterly revenue targets? What happens when the school turns a total blind eye to the constant bullying of your (naturally brilliant and hard working) John Galt Jr. because the bully's dad is a partner on the school board?
Bill was in the right place at the right time through pure dumb luck, created & abused a monopoly to push out the competition, and got his start through his momma's business connections. Jobs had three great runs (first and second stints at Apple, Pixar) but he is the incredibly rare exception, not the obnoxiously elitist rule.
Actually that's continuing to stick fingers in the ears. Who armed those religious fanatics? The United States. Who's the greatest recruiter for religious extremists? The U.S. military, when it bombs weddings and funerals and schools and markets and apartments and hospitals. Who's ensured that more countries are run by religious extremists? The United States, when it props up the most repressive government in the world, Saudi Arabia. The United States, when it overthrows secular governments in Afghanistan and Iran and Libya and Iraq and Syria (work in progress).
On what planet is Hillary's email server "small"? In order of proportion, you're comparing an anthill (sailor's cell phone) to Mt. Everest. With Mt. McKinley parked on top it (HRC's email server). Sandy Berger, by comparison, had a literal handful of documents (he had them in his pants pockets) and pled to 2 years probation, a $50,000 fine, and the loss of his security clearance and law license.
Do tell us how this election would go if Hillary was entering the debates with Trump on probation, disbarred, and without a security clearance for the first three years of her presidency. Oh, and part of the reason Berger was prosecuted? He destroyed the classified material he had. How many emails did Hillary delete from her server? Over 30,000. Sure, she claims those were personal, but she also claimed that none of them were marked classified at the time (pure mendacity as that information is inherently classified) but lied about that too.
Anyone else, the charges would include Obstruction of Justice, in addition to mishandling classified evidence.
Yes, taking pictures on his phone was a deliberate act. Setting up a private, unsecured, unauthorized email server to run 100% of your highly classified email communications was also a deliberate act. How much power does a cognitive dissonance generator require to ignore the parallels and the scale involved? Is it powered by a fusion reactor?
Nope. Going back to the sailor again, even the the DOJ prosecutors agree that he had no intent to distribute the pictures. Because intent is irrelevant in the government's eyes, only the action matters. The act of mishandling classified evidence. Just ask any whisteblower to face the DOJ's wrath, like John Kiriakou. The only person to go to prison for the CIA's brutal torture program....is the man who revealed it's existence.
You're too stupid to help anyone. It's the job of the person making the assertion to back it up. Don't think so? Then I causally assert that Trailer Trash likes to have sex with pigs in the mud, and leave you to disprove that assertion.