nucklepunche wrote:In the long run I believe taxes ought to be flat. In the short run I'd favor tax increases on the wealthy until we pay down our debt.
Why should taxes be flat? That's just shifting the burden away from those who receive the disproportionate benefits. The wealthy get more benefits from the government than anyone else; by rights they
ought to pay a larger portion of the cost. Handing out some welfare breadcrumbs to the poor and lower middle class is peanuts compared to the corporate wealthfare the rich benefit from--or compared to the value of the government providing and protecting the property privileges of the rich.
Essentially Singapore has mandatory HSAs combined with guaranteed major medical coverage and subsidies for the poor. This is what I favor. Actually part of the problem with why health care costs so much is that people don't shop around and look for good deals.
It's not even possible to shop around for deals in health care. What, are you going to take a second-rate replacement hip? Go for that used pacemaker? Discount pills? Shady cut-rate doctors? If you take a chance getting a deal on a dining room table or something, that's no big loss if it turns out to be a lemon. If your pacemaker has a problem? That's a whole different level of crazy. Health care costs a lot primarily because there are no cost control measures at all. "Shopping around" doesn't really make sense as a cost control measure in medicine because people A) lack sufficient knowledge to judge cost-benefits in medicine, B) often don't know they have a problem until they've already picked a provider, and C) have an incredibly strong preference for "the best" regardless of cost. There are, however, plenty of measures that
insurance providers can take, such as networked service plans, group discounts, or simply leveraging large insurance pools to force providers to accept lower payments. Individually patients do not have any realistic ability to drive prices down--at best they can simply opt to accept lower quality health care, which doesn't seem like a reasonable response at all. Comparison shopping for medical services doesn't really work for patients who lack the expert knowledge to judge the quality of various courses of treatment, or the credentials of a service provider.
Those with good insurance are a privileged class whereas those who do not have it are underprivileged. The thing is since the majority of medical costs go to the well insured, particularly those over 65, there is no incentive. People never see their medical bills.
I have
never not had a medical bill for treatment since I've been old enough to carry my own insurance. I ask again, have you ever actually carried your own insurance? You get a bill for services provided--and the insurance company tells you what portion of it they'll cover, and how much of it you actually do owe. The only time where you don't have pricing information is when you have to get emergency treatment or something.
It's kind of like how you go to the grocery store and everybody looks for deals and it drives down prices overall because if they charged too high of prices they would jack all prices up.
Getting the store brand of canned tomatoes is rather different from getting the discount bargain bin pacemaker. Not the least of which because anyone has sufficient knowledge to judge the value of the store brand tomatoes--most people don't have the expert knowledge necessary to judge the skill of a doctor, or the various merits of different courses of medical treatment. Medical services are not like buying groceries. If I make the wrong choice when buying a head of lettuce, I have a bad salad one night. If I make the wrong choice when choosing a surgeon, I could easily end up dead.
There's a reason whole foods can tack on astronomical markups, yes their stuff is more expensive but they also make bigger profit margins than the pennies on the dollar most stores make. It's because cost isn't as much of an object for their clientele. It's just the psychological effect. In France for instance the government subsidizes all care 100% but you have to pay because the government feels like if you do you will not overconsume. It works beautifully. Granted the French government is profligate in many other areas, such as its ridiculously low retirement age, but in this area it hits the nail on the head.
I don't think anyone is objecting to charging minor fees for medical service as a means of diminishing over-utilization; that is different from adopting an insane health care system comprised of mandatory high-deductible PPOs and HSAs for everyone.
Realistically this would never pass. However the elderly voters are incredibly selfish. Most of the greatest generation is dead but those coming of age now suck. They demand their socialism tooth and claw but fight against any tax increase on them or any program that helps anybody but them.
Government-provided health insurance is about as "socialist" as credit unions. Why shouldn't they be selfish? That only makes sense. They've been trained from birth to be mindlessly self-interested. We live in a society that glorifies self-interest above common-interest, so why should we expect them to be any different in old age? It's the terrible consequence of the capitalists getting exactly what they wished for.
Thanks for the compliment. I was listening to Michael Savage and he was shitting bricks in anger over this. A lot of conservatives oppose it. This makes no sense. They are always saying poor people need to get off the state teat because they don't really have it that bad etc. but then when it affects the wealthy they cry and moan. It simply shows conservatism is not so much pro-market as it is pro-wealthy. Look at how many proposed raising taxes on the poor.
Our entire society is ruthlessly pro-wealthy. Your own proposals are mostly pro-wealthy proposals. Maybe you don't realize that? A flat tax? Come on, that's the very essence of wealthfare.
What do you propose to solve our current demographic problems?
Our "demographic problems" are blown entirely out of proportion. What's not commonly reported is the fact that the baby boomers did a fairly good job of replacing themselves. The generation now leaving the workforce is about the same size as the generation now entering the workforce. What differs is that the expected earning potential (in terms of purchasing power) is dramatically lower for younger workers than it is for older workers. This is the consequence of wages remaining sticky, while inflation runs rampant--or, in other words, the consequence of the criminally pro-wealth agenda that has been the policy of the US government for the last 30-40 years. Why are our long term programs in financial trouble? Because the new workers may be just as numerous as the old, but they won't be earning nearly as much for their work.
Conservative pundits like to scream about how social security is a ponzi scheme and so on, but that's simply not true. Social Security would work fine if wages would keep pace with productive output. By rights we ought to be able to cover the cost of the elderly with fewer workers merely because of the insane productivity increases we've seen over the last few decades. There
shouldn't be any kind of solvency problem, but there is because the benefits of American productivity haven't "trickled down" to workers at all.
The solution to this is not to import a huge number of additional workers; that merely pushes the problem further down the road (and makes the ultimate failure far more catastrophic). The solution is to adopt policies that will actually drive wages and meaningful productive activity higher. Unfortunately in this political climate that basically can't be done--there is no way to do so without facing down the pro-wealth goblins in Washington, and they run both parties right now.
I said at the start that in the short run I favor increasing the wealthy taxes until we get the deficit paid down.
The wealthy ought to pay more simply by virtue of the fact that they
get more from the government.
I am in favor of a liberal immigration policy (as are most economist) but you can't just pull the door off the hinges automatically. It would be chaos. Every third world immigrant would rush for America immediately overwhelming our infrastructure.
I think the threat of that is vastly overblown. We would certainly get more skilled immigrants, but I don't think there would be some flood across the border. Not any more than we already have anyway.
Sorry but all that liberal arts hippie shit still isn't for everybody no matter how much you want to fantasize that we can all be Aristotle we cannot.
That's some fairly typical Straussian bullshit on your part. Liberal arts
are for everyone. You don't have to "be Aristotle" to get benefits from having a liberal education--something Leo Strauss and his followers never really understood.
Sorry, but you have your head up your ass on this one.
Sure, because people who've never had an education in economics ought to vote on economic matters. Right? Because in effect you're saying that the liberal arts has no benefit in a democratic society--despite the fact that in a democratic society regular citizens do get to make decisions that could well be informed by a knowledge of social sciences.
A lot of things are not economically viable without government life support. Our government opened up the west with the Erie Canal. They helped the railroads. They build the interstate highway. This is what government is for imho. It's negative function is to keep public order. It's positive function is to do things individuals and corporations cannot or will not do on their own, the big things in other words.
Which is just another way of saying "It's okay that the government directs public funds from efficient allocation into inefficient allocation. It's okay that the government forces society to produce waste rather than useful products." Of course, given your support for military hardware financing, support for government waste is implied anyway...
Federal policy created suburbs in the first place. Think the interstate.
Why thank the government for forcing our society to adopt increasingly inefficient urban models? That's not something that we ought to "thank" the interstates for. Suburbs are a blight. Cities that can only be effectively navigated by privately owned cars are even worse.
At the time it was a smart idea but in retrospect it might have caused some problems. Still the suburbanization of society could not happen absent government.
Leaving people alone will generally cause less problems than government intervention. Of course, the government support for suburbs really had nothing much to do with thinking it was a "good idea" for urban planning. The only people who thought it was a "good idea" were the powerful business interests interested in maintaining a market for automobiles, homes, and loans. Suburbs have caused nothing but trouble.
Ever hear of the comparative advantage?
Sure, I have one of those fancy liberal arts educations you seem so dismissive of; therefore I
do understand comparative advantage. That's why I know that it has nothing to do with free trade; comparative advantage can (and usually does) exist in any trading relationship, regardless of any tariffs that might exist between two nations. It is about the relative opportunity costs of production within two different economies; the comparative advantage exists regardless of whether or not trade actually occurs because of transaction costs like tariffs. This does not mean that every country ought to want to open its borders to comparatively advantageous production elsewhere. Economics is rooted in psychology; if an economic policy does not serve the people who make the decisions, then it is bad economic policy... even if it might be somewhat more efficient from a material standpoint. In a society where the public is presumed to make the decisions, then economic policies which disrupt employment and reduce wages (like free trade with countries that hold comparative advantage within industries) are bad policies.
Economists on the right simply accept the premise that more stuff is better; but in fact the people involved in the economy care very much about how that stuff is produced. They do care if they can be involved in the production or whether they will be denied that opportunity by national borders. They care very much when they're driven out of higher paying manufacturing jobs and into low-wage food service jobs, even if they could theoretically buy more widgets (if not for their reduced wages).
At first China may have hurt American manufacturing but in twenty years it will be cheaper to manufacture in Alabama and Mississippi than China.
Not so long as the Chinese maintain their exports-first economic and monetary policies, and our government continues to hold its no-interference-in-foreign-trade unofficial policy. If we're not willing to step into the ring and fight it out with the Chinese when it comes to trade policy, it will never be comparatively advantageous to produce goods in Alabama or Mississippi. By then the Chinese will have the technical advantage, the resource advantage, the manpower advantage, and the
market proximity advantage. By the time the Chinese stop caring about exports first, they will have become the world's primary market already--and we'll be the ones who have to overcome Chinese trade barriers and the cost of transportation across the Pacific. Free trade without labor standardization and free labor agreements is insane.
Actually I think the great American middle is actually sick of social issues. It's only the Religious Reich and the Lifestyle Left. Ultimately I think these social issues are best left up to states.
People still care; you underestimate the partisanship of the middle. "Independents" are not as independent as they like to think.
We never charged the German POWs because war is different than a civil infraction. The point is you do not need a state to be in a state of war.
Of course you need states to have wars; we were able to hold the German POWs because it was assumed that we would repatriate them after the war was concluded between our state and theirs. There is no such prospect for victory in a "war on terror", where there is no state with whom we could reach a political settlement, nor any definable war objectives to meet and thereby claim victory.
More to the point, we have not been treating these detainees as prisoners of war anyway; we have not afforded them the productions guaranteed to prisoners of war either. If you want to categorize them as POWs, we would have certain obligations to meet as well... and so far we have not met those obligations. Either they're POWs and entitled to a set of rights we have not granted, or they're civilians who have engaged in criminal acts--and entitled to a set of rights we haven't granted. This legal fiction of "enemy combatants" is just that--fiction. There is no justification for it other than the fact that our government is a lawless government that doesn't feel inclined to follow its own rules in this matter.
Do Israelis force women to wear burkas? Do they stone homosexuals? Do they execute people for apostasy from Judaism?
None of these things are done in several Middle Eastern states; Turkey, for example, does not require women to wear burqas, nor does it allow the stoning of homosexuals, nor executions for apostasy. It is not alone in meeting these basic criteria for human rights in the region. No doubt Israel does not have the
worst record in the region, but that in no way excuses them for their excessive abuses. Especially not if we want to justify our relationship with them by arguing that they're a lone bastion of progressive western ideals in the region.
No they do not. Case closed. I am not an unapologetic Israel supporter but please, for all Israel's flaws it is the ACLU compared to other Middle Eastern governments.
Compared with some yes, and you will find that the left is also critical of those other governments. We are merely more vocal about Israel because it is more likely to
have a positive impact on the situation. Those of us living in the US or the EU
can try to get our governments to cool their relations with Israel because of Israeli human rights abuses; but there is no such outlet when it comes to relations with, say, Iran--because there are none to cool.
Arguing that we ought to give Israel a pass because others are worse is effectively saying that we ought not tackle the problems that we can do something about because there are worse problems we can do nothing to address. It's not a sensible position.
We don't live in the 1800s anymore. Please tell me how Wyoming competes with New York at the national level.
Mike Enzi, and John Barrasso. Or, arguably, through private means--through lobbying efforts by companies and individuals who live in Wyoming. Plenty of people who live there have lots of money to throw into political persuasion, and that gives them a measure of power in the national government. Power that your system that bans lobbying would remove. To take away their Senators too would strip them of any meaningful say whatsoever.
Let us not forget that former vice president Dick Cheney was from Wyoming--hardly an example of someone lacking political power. Why would he have been chosen rather than someone from New York? Because he brought a lot of gravitas to the table.
Also why shouldn't New York Republicans and Wyoming Democrats get their votes to count because as of right now they do not.
The electoral college could always be allocated proportionally. There is no rule but state rules that prohibit proportional allocation of electoral college electors. It is only a statewide plurality vote because the states have chosen to adopt that rule.
Something tells me that you are the sort of person who will simply disagree to disagree. I had quite the ideological stew. It's hard to imagine that with as diverse of views as I have there is somebody who holds the exact opposite viewpoints except for the sake of disagreeing.
Your positions are fairly standard Straussian neoconservative positions. It is not surprising that we would disagree--there is little common ground between neoconservatives and libertarian socialists.
- By Fasces
- By Puffer Fish
- By Unthinking Majority
- By wat0n