I know there is a fashion lately to try and force people to be "gender neutral" in their writing, but "he" has for a very long time been a standard reference that you use in English when the sex of the person being referred to is unspecified. It's perfectly acceptable and anyone who is offended by it is either incapable of critical thinking, uneducated or simply looking for something to be offended by. It's not any more insulting to a female reader to refer to "he" in the generic when writing something generic than referring to a ship as "her" is insulting to males who happen to work on "her".
Should all men in the United States be insulted that America is referred to as "her" in the song God Bless America? No, because we understand that in the English language, one personal pronoun doesn't _always_ mean a specific human sex. We have traditions of usage that add poetry to the language and customs that work fine for communication, which is supposed to be the intent of speech and writing.
So yeah, you can signal your feminism group-think all you want by writing or saying something stupid like "him/her" or "s/he", but depending on your audience, you're likely saying more about the influence of your modern teachers and your personal inability to discern importance than you are about anything of significance.
if 90 percent of people were in the initial cohort and 90 percent of people were in the final cohort, at least 80 percent would still be in the lower 90 percent.
I said they have as a whole become wealthier. That doesn't require much movement among the cohorts, because the cohorts are based on percentages of population, not absolute wealth levels.
My 9 year old daughter is debt free, but doesn't really have any income. That places her as wealthier than 2 BILLION people (with negative net worth) using your methodology!
There are "lies, damn lies, and statistics." Your use of statistics falls into that category.
It doesn't matter how wealthy people are compared to each other, unless your overwhelming consideration is jealousy. It matters how wealthy people are compared to how wealthy they used to be.
Also "the bottom 90 percent became poorer" is an inaccurate statement, unsupported by the data. If you took the people considered part of the "bottom 90 percent" in 2009 after the housing/financial crisis, those specific people have as a whole become wealthier. The current group of people (in 2014) they might rate as the "bottom 90 percent" are a significantly different set of individuals, many of whom were not in the "bottom 90 percent" in 2009.
Except of course, if you click on it via Google it bypasses the paywall because of the referrer data being passed... sorry, thought this was a tech site.
Because the people involved in the prosecutions and classifications don't report up to him as the head of the executive branch? Because he doesn't have an absolute pardon power to pardon anyone he likes? You'd blame the CEO of a company for what his company does. In this case the President has way more legal power to intervene than a CEO would in a similar situation. Heck, after President Obama's recent stint of just changing laws with only a fig leaf of legal basis beyond he said so, presumably his administration thinks he can just unilaterally declare they weren't enforcing the law in these particular types of cases.
I bet the first airline promoting a policy of randomly offering 90% off or free first class to every X users would get a big boost in business.
And then they'd stop after people learned to go to checkout to see if they'd "won", and if not stop or get a refund, clear their cookies, etc... and try again.
With the onset of lasseiz faire capitalism and the "corporation as top tier person"
What country are you talking about? The U.S. has been going steadily away from laissez faire capitalism for at least 100 years now... to the point where it might actually start turning back in the other direction as more and more centrally-planned fiascoes are revealed and the old socialist hippies start dying off.
Your other disconnect seems to be thinking that "corporation as top tier person" is laissez faire, as opposed to a government rent-seeking benefit largely found in countries with more government control of the economy. Pro-economic freedom doesn't necessarily mean pro-government organized corporation.
that left tens of millions without health insurance
At this rate, it's highly likely that there will be more uninsured in the U.S. over the next few years than over the last few years. That's what happens when you make a product significantly more expensive and more difficult to sell and to purchase.
If you think things are bad now, wait until next year when the business mandate that Obama unilaterally delayed kicks in. That's going to be even worse for the people who already had insurance....
The real question is why the Democrats needed to take over the entire health insurance industry if the goal was to just help pay for insurance for a few million folks that didn't have it and wanted it. You could have covered that with a check just out of what's been spent on the federal and state ACA exchanges.
The reality is that this has always been about the Dems making a federal power grab over health insurance and the health industry. That was never going to do anything but make the already massive government-induced problems in the insurance and health industries worse.
You may want to also factor in that insurance in NY is much more expensive than in many other parts of the country. The OP didn't specify a location, so it's difficult to tell, but I've had plans on the individual market before that were $350/month for a family of 6 in one state (after paying $1300/month in a high cost state), so $165/month for an younger individual doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
Now, of course, the whole country is being forced into NY/NJ/MA-style expensive plans, so that all goes way up...
Of course, those estimates are wildly inaccurate, to the point of being worse than no estimates at all....
Notice that following the estimate process, you get told about possible subsidies repeatedly, but that never once do they ask for your age? Wait, isn't that one of the most important things to determine what your premium will be??? Ooops.... it's almost like they're just quoting based on an assumption that you're 27 years old or something like that...
Here's a useful chart covering spending and revenue with who controlled what. People like to talk about Presidential "spending", but the reality is that Congress can spend anything they want without the President (supermajority), but the President can't spend a dime without Congress.
Reagan asked for less spending than Congress ever gave him. Clinton asked for more spending than Congress ever gave him.
If you go by history, democrats know how to balance the budget and bring deficits down.
Please name the last year in which Democrats controlled Congress (The folks who make the ultimate funding decisions) and managed to balance the budget and reduce the deficit?
Oops, has never happened, has it? Only time we've even come close in recent memory was when the Republicans "shut the government down" in opposition to Clinton and they negotiated a somewhat reasonable budget. Hint: Clinton's suggested budgets were much higher than what got passed by Congress.
Revenue is about the same per capita over an extended period of time. It will go up and down with economic conditions, and economic conditions are still a bit down lately, so revenue will be as well until that has turned around. Studies have been done showing that despite historical tax rate changes, revenue generally stays in a similar range. You can cut taxes and increase growth a little, or you can raise certain taxes and divert resources to avoidance and paperwork, but it's really not that big of an impact. You have to have economic activity in order to tax it, unless we're going to switch to a model of confiscating based on saved wealth directly.
Government spending, on the other hand, has significantly increased. You can blame the war/terrorism funding, or the bailouts, or the wasteful spending to cronies of those in power, or increase entitlements for an aging population, but you can't deny that it's increased significantly, no matter how you want to measure it.
So the only really serious conversation to have about fixing debt/deficit issues is what you want to cut in terms of spending. If we could get the right-wing to agree to cut defense/anti-terrorism spending and the left-wing to cut environmental/wealth transfer boondoggles, and/or slightly increase the age for retirement for SS/Medicare, or cut the useless ACA, or whatever, even if overall only by 5-10% around current spending levels year-over-year it could be solved pretty quickly.
But there doesn't seem to be much interest in that sort of thing. People are more interested in trying to score political points.
So, what you're stating is that inflation adjusted dollars (in the chart I linked to) don't adjust for inflation? Hmmm... seems you may have misread something. As Magius confirms below, revenue and spending are both up, spending is up more. You can blame that on war spending or hookers and blow for Obama's special family friends, either way, still have to reign it in to fix the deficit/debt.
As for your other point, using % of GDP is basically useless. GDP varies based on the state of the economy, so the exact same level of spending from year to year will be a varying percentage of GDP. Also, government spending is counted as part of standard GDP. What kind of comparison is that for showing if it's increased or not? It's primary use is to try and disguise real money increases as not being as bad, because the economy has also grown.
Now if you wanted to use spending in constant dollars per capita, that might be somewhat useful, as you can argue at least some things cost more with more people (things like national defense don't really change much, but some others do). Even with that, you'd have to argue that at 10-12% population change since 2000 needed a 50%+ increase in spending. So that's a tough argument to make...
If you look at a chart of revenue and spending in constant dollars, you'll see that after the 1998 tax cuts, revenue increased until the dot.com bust in 2000. Revenue was down until the 2001 & 2003 Bush tax cuts, after which it increased until the housing bubble burst in 2007/08. Tha major tax cuts in the era you're talking about weren't followed by revenue decreases in the years right after they took effect. Revenue right now is about average for the last 15 years, down a bit because it follows the state of the economy and the economy overall is still down. Minor changes in tax rates don't affect revenue that much. Annual revenue is UP about a trillion dollars since 1980, so it's not like we've suddenly had less revenue than ever before.
Spending is the the obvious issue. Since 1980, spending is up $1.8 Trillion (still constant, i.e. inflation adjusted dollars). Since 2000, it's up over a Trillion dollars.
Bottom line, revenue is way up. Spending is just way, way more up. Revenue has gone in the desired direction. The issue is that Spending has gone in the wrong direction if we want to solve anything related to debt and deficits.
If they know what URL is being called to cause the problem, Site B might be able to figure out Site A from logs for the client's that include the Refer in their request for it, but once they've identified the URL itself, they can just fix the actual vulnerability or block that specific URL with a redirect or something similar.
Once I found a major party's official state website allowed anyone to post and execute arbitrary PHP with full access via just filling in a comment text field, I stopped being surprised by how clueless people were about configuring their sites...
Why, it's not just bots! If you put a link out on a public web site, real people might even click on the link for you!
Next you'll be suggesting that you could do that transparently to the user and have their browser re-use their already logged in session on another site to do things with their credentials for you!!!!
What will they think of next? It's a good thing we have these wonderful stories to explain how this whole web thingy works with all it's links and stuff...
My son will be covered by our health care until he is 26. Good thing.
Don't you mean insurance? Or are you conceding now that this has nothing to do with insurance. Wait until you see the bill....
Pre-existing conditions not a reason for no insurance for millions of people. Great thing.
I'd be willing to wager that more people in the United States will have no insurance a year after the ACA took affect than in the average of the 10 years before. Care to take me up on that wager?
Raising the price of something and making it fit an individual's needs less doesn't typically lend itself to a higher sales volume.
And you would propose what? Do tell, oh wise slash dotter.
No, the question is, "If they signed a contract to provide X, and did not provide X, why did they get paid?"
Because in the world of government ACA website contracting, all the contractors can deliver their X and the thing can still not work at all.
This was a failure at a higher level than the individual contractors involved. Picture taking a few committees with folks like your local city council members/school board members and having them architect and design a $500 million IT project and lay out the specifications for other groups to execute in small chunks.
You get things like a design that couldn't possibly work, contradicting specifications, no testing nor bug fix time, etc...
The bottom line is incompetence at the very highest levels of government.
If Obama was smart at all, he'd have known this was coming and gracefully "given in" to the Republicans who were demanding a delay in ACA implementation in exchange for some concessions from the GOP on spending/taxes. Then he wouldn't look like such an idiot that his only "major accomplishment" is such a clusterf***.
As long as your provider keeps offering it you can keep your existing coverage.
You missed a few caveats there....
As long as your provider keeps offering it you can keep your existing coverage, as long as: They never make any changes to it, including price, deductibles/copays (over $5), etc... They comply with the coverage mandates in the law, like lifetime limits, covering adults up to 26, etc... It's not an HSA plan. It doesn't make "too" much money for the insurance company in any particular year. It doesn't need new enrollees to offset people who drop coverage.
So yeah, as long as time is frozen and no one ever wants to adjust anything, except to follow more expensive mandates and lose money on it, your provider can keep offering the plan.
I mean, it's not like the Obama Administration knew that "language in ACA regulations dated July 2010 estimates that "40 to 67%" of consumers will lose their health policies", right?
Slashdot Mirror
I know there is a fashion lately to try and force people to be "gender neutral" in their writing, but "he" has for a very long time been a standard reference that you use in English when the sex of the person being referred to is unspecified. It's perfectly acceptable and anyone who is offended by it is either incapable of critical thinking, uneducated or simply looking for something to be offended by. It's not any more insulting to a female reader to refer to "he" in the generic when writing something generic than referring to a ship as "her" is insulting to males who happen to work on "her".
Should all men in the United States be insulted that America is referred to as "her" in the song God Bless America? No, because we understand that in the English language, one personal pronoun doesn't _always_ mean a specific human sex. We have traditions of usage that add poetry to the language and customs that work fine for communication, which is supposed to be the intent of speech and writing.
So yeah, you can signal your feminism group-think all you want by writing or saying something stupid like "him/her" or "s/he", but depending on your audience, you're likely saying more about the influence of your modern teachers and your personal inability to discern importance than you are about anything of significance.
The world death rate is about .85%/year, or over 5 years, ~4.25%. The world birth rate is about 2%/year, or over 5 years, about 10%.
Now factor in how much people's wealth changes, which is relatively consistent as they get older.
So yeah, add all that up and I'd call it pretty significant for only 5 years later.
I said they have as a whole become wealthier. That doesn't require much movement among the cohorts, because the cohorts are based on percentages of population, not absolute wealth levels.
My 9 year old daughter is debt free, but doesn't really have any income. That places her as wealthier than 2 BILLION people (with negative net worth) using your methodology!
There are "lies, damn lies, and statistics." Your use of statistics falls into that category.
It doesn't matter how wealthy people are compared to each other, unless your overwhelming consideration is jealousy. It matters how wealthy people are compared to how wealthy they used to be.
Also "the bottom 90 percent became poorer" is an inaccurate statement, unsupported by the data. If you took the people considered part of the "bottom 90 percent" in 2009 after the housing/financial crisis, those specific people have as a whole become wealthier. The current group of people (in 2014) they might rate as the "bottom 90 percent" are a significantly different set of individuals, many of whom were not in the "bottom 90 percent" in 2009.
Except of course, if you click on it via Google it bypasses the paywall because of the referrer data being passed... sorry, thought this was a tech site.
Use this link instead, click on the top result:
https://www.google.com/search?...
A pain, I know.
Because the people involved in the prosecutions and classifications don't report up to him as the head of the executive branch? Because he doesn't have an absolute pardon power to pardon anyone he likes? You'd blame the CEO of a company for what his company does. In this case the President has way more legal power to intervene than a CEO would in a similar situation. Heck, after President Obama's recent stint of just changing laws with only a fig leaf of legal basis beyond he said so, presumably his administration thinks he can just unilaterally declare they weren't enforcing the law in these particular types of cases.
Asimov did predict that alpha particles would have the potential to disrupt computer memory back in 1952.....
This is so the new vending machines can accept CokeCoin transfers.... and mine more coins when they aren't busy.
I'm kidding, of course, everyone knows a rapper will create the first branded Bitcoin copycat currency!
I bet the first airline promoting a policy of randomly offering 90% off or free first class to every X users would get a big boost in business.
And then they'd stop after people learned to go to checkout to see if they'd "won", and if not stop or get a refund, clear their cookies, etc... and try again.
With the onset of lasseiz faire capitalism and the "corporation as top tier person"
What country are you talking about? The U.S. has been going steadily away from laissez faire capitalism for at least 100 years now... to the point where it might actually start turning back in the other direction as more and more centrally-planned fiascoes are revealed and the old socialist hippies start dying off.
Your other disconnect seems to be thinking that "corporation as top tier person" is laissez faire, as opposed to a government rent-seeking benefit largely found in countries with more government control of the economy. Pro-economic freedom doesn't necessarily mean pro-government organized corporation.
At this rate, it's highly likely that there will be more uninsured in the U.S. over the next few years than over the last few years. That's what happens when you make a product significantly more expensive and more difficult to sell and to purchase.
If you think things are bad now, wait until next year when the business mandate that Obama unilaterally delayed kicks in. That's going to be even worse for the people who already had insurance....
The real question is why the Democrats needed to take over the entire health insurance industry if the goal was to just help pay for insurance for a few million folks that didn't have it and wanted it. You could have covered that with a check just out of what's been spent on the federal and state ACA exchanges.
The reality is that this has always been about the Dems making a federal power grab over health insurance and the health industry. That was never going to do anything but make the already massive government-induced problems in the insurance and health industries worse.
You may want to also factor in that insurance in NY is much more expensive than in many other parts of the country. The OP didn't specify a location, so it's difficult to tell, but I've had plans on the individual market before that were $350/month for a family of 6 in one state (after paying $1300/month in a high cost state), so $165/month for an younger individual doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
Now, of course, the whole country is being forced into NY/NJ/MA-style expensive plans, so that all goes way up...
Of course, those estimates are wildly inaccurate, to the point of being worse than no estimates at all....
Notice that following the estimate process, you get told about possible subsidies repeatedly, but that never once do they ask for your age? Wait, isn't that one of the most important things to determine what your premium will be??? Ooops.... it's almost like they're just quoting based on an assumption that you're 27 years old or something like that...
Here's a useful chart covering spending and revenue with who controlled what. People like to talk about Presidential "spending", but the reality is that Congress can spend anything they want without the President (supermajority), but the President can't spend a dime without Congress.
Reagan asked for less spending than Congress ever gave him. Clinton asked for more spending than Congress ever gave him.
If you go by history, democrats know how to balance the budget and bring deficits down.
Please name the last year in which Democrats controlled Congress (The folks who make the ultimate funding decisions) and managed to balance the budget and reduce the deficit?
Oops, has never happened, has it? Only time we've even come close in recent memory was when the Republicans "shut the government down" in opposition to Clinton and they negotiated a somewhat reasonable budget. Hint: Clinton's suggested budgets were much higher than what got passed by Congress.
Revenue is about the same per capita over an extended period of time. It will go up and down with economic conditions, and economic conditions are still a bit down lately, so revenue will be as well until that has turned around. Studies have been done showing that despite historical tax rate changes, revenue generally stays in a similar range. You can cut taxes and increase growth a little, or you can raise certain taxes and divert resources to avoidance and paperwork, but it's really not that big of an impact. You have to have economic activity in order to tax it, unless we're going to switch to a model of confiscating based on saved wealth directly.
Government spending, on the other hand, has significantly increased. You can blame the war/terrorism funding, or the bailouts, or the wasteful spending to cronies of those in power, or increase entitlements for an aging population, but you can't deny that it's increased significantly, no matter how you want to measure it.
So the only really serious conversation to have about fixing debt/deficit issues is what you want to cut in terms of spending. If we could get the right-wing to agree to cut defense/anti-terrorism spending and the left-wing to cut environmental/wealth transfer boondoggles, and/or slightly increase the age for retirement for SS/Medicare, or cut the useless ACA, or whatever, even if overall only by 5-10% around current spending levels year-over-year it could be solved pretty quickly.
But there doesn't seem to be much interest in that sort of thing. People are more interested in trying to score political points.
So, what you're stating is that inflation adjusted dollars (in the chart I linked to) don't adjust for inflation? Hmmm... seems you may have misread something. As Magius confirms below, revenue and spending are both up, spending is up more. You can blame that on war spending or hookers and blow for Obama's special family friends, either way, still have to reign it in to fix the deficit/debt.
As for your other point, using % of GDP is basically useless. GDP varies based on the state of the economy, so the exact same level of spending from year to year will be a varying percentage of GDP. Also, government spending is counted as part of standard GDP. What kind of comparison is that for showing if it's increased or not? It's primary use is to try and disguise real money increases as not being as bad, because the economy has also grown.
Now if you wanted to use spending in constant dollars per capita, that might be somewhat useful, as you can argue at least some things cost more with more people (things like national defense don't really change much, but some others do). Even with that, you'd have to argue that at 10-12% population change since 2000 needed a 50%+ increase in spending. So that's a tough argument to make...
The problem with your analysis is that you have the facts wrong.
If you look at a chart of revenue and spending in constant dollars, you'll see that after the 1998 tax cuts, revenue increased until the dot.com bust in 2000. Revenue was down until the 2001 & 2003 Bush tax cuts, after which it increased until the housing bubble burst in 2007/08. Tha major tax cuts in the era you're talking about weren't followed by revenue decreases in the years right after they took effect. Revenue right now is about average for the last 15 years, down a bit because it follows the state of the economy and the economy overall is still down. Minor changes in tax rates don't affect revenue that much. Annual revenue is UP about a trillion dollars since 1980, so it's not like we've suddenly had less revenue than ever before.
Spending is the the obvious issue. Since 1980, spending is up $1.8 Trillion (still constant, i.e. inflation adjusted dollars). Since 2000, it's up over a Trillion dollars.
Bottom line, revenue is way up. Spending is just way, way more up. Revenue has gone in the desired direction. The issue is that Spending has gone in the wrong direction if we want to solve anything related to debt and deficits.
If they know what URL is being called to cause the problem, Site B might be able to figure out Site A from logs for the client's that include the Refer in their request for it, but once they've identified the URL itself, they can just fix the actual vulnerability or block that specific URL with a redirect or something similar.
Once I found a major party's official state website allowed anyone to post and execute arbitrary PHP with full access via just filling in a comment text field, I stopped being surprised by how clueless people were about configuring their sites...
Exactly. That's the sort of thing I mean by "transparently to the user". Sorry if my sarcasm was too obscure.
Why, it's not just bots! If you put a link out on a public web site, real people might even click on the link for you!
Next you'll be suggesting that you could do that transparently to the user and have their browser re-use their already logged in session on another site to do things with their credentials for you!!!!
What will they think of next? It's a good thing we have these wonderful stories to explain how this whole web thingy works with all it's links and stuff...
My son will be covered by our health care until he is 26. Good thing.
Don't you mean insurance? Or are you conceding now that this has nothing to do with insurance. Wait until you see the bill....
Pre-existing conditions not a reason for no insurance for millions of people. Great thing.
I'd be willing to wager that more people in the United States will have no insurance a year after the ACA took affect than in the average of the 10 years before. Care to take me up on that wager?
Raising the price of something and making it fit an individual's needs less doesn't typically lend itself to a higher sales volume.
And you would propose what? Do tell, oh wise slash dotter.
How about we start with the health care proposals at the bottom of this economic analysis?
No, the question is, "If they signed a contract to provide X, and did not provide X, why did they get paid?"
Because in the world of government ACA website contracting, all the contractors can deliver their X and the thing can still not work at all.
This was a failure at a higher level than the individual contractors involved. Picture taking a few committees with folks like your local city council members/school board members and having them architect and design a $500 million IT project and lay out the specifications for other groups to execute in small chunks.
You get things like a design that couldn't possibly work, contradicting specifications, no testing nor bug fix time, etc...
The bottom line is incompetence at the very highest levels of government.
If Obama was smart at all, he'd have known this was coming and gracefully "given in" to the Republicans who were demanding a delay in ACA implementation in exchange for some concessions from the GOP on spending/taxes. Then he wouldn't look like such an idiot that his only "major accomplishment" is such a clusterf***.
You missed a few caveats there....
As long as your provider keeps offering it you can keep your existing coverage, as long as:
They never make any changes to it, including price, deductibles/copays (over $5), etc...
They comply with the coverage mandates in the law, like lifetime limits, covering adults up to 26, etc...
It's not an HSA plan.
It doesn't make "too" much money for the insurance company in any particular year.
It doesn't need new enrollees to offset people who drop coverage.
So yeah, as long as time is frozen and no one ever wants to adjust anything, except to follow more expensive mandates and lose money on it, your provider can keep offering the plan.
I mean, it's not like the Obama Administration knew that "language in ACA regulations dated July 2010 estimates that "40 to 67%" of consumers will lose their health policies", right?