You have health care in the United States if you are destitute. That’s what Medicaid is for. Beyond Medicaid there are city hospitals that cannot refuse emergency treatment. Nationalized health care will ultimately lead to rationing. Canadians come to the United States because their need for medical attention exceeds their desire to wait. Canada socialized their system in 1984 so there is a working example of what happens in 20 just years of bureaucracy.
Never, ever confess to something like this. When you’ve hit the mark so perfectly, you should just sit back and let everyone think that your repository of detailed, arcane knowledge is truly vast. 
It’s a great cheap-shot, but your comparison doesn’t hold water.
Kerry’s economic policies are in no way analagous to those of the democratic socialist nations of continental Europe. If you want even a halfway decent comparison, take the UK or Australia–and even these two countries are higher-taxing than anything Kerry would propose. Australia, I might add, displays 13 years of consistent growth, close to full employment and very low price inflation (under a conservative government true, but the Australian right-wing is to the left of American liberalism in most regards.) And it has, as most measures would have it, a higher standard of living than the US.
(1) The fact that hospitals can’t turn you away if you need emergency treatment is a far cry from having good medical care…especially preventative medical care that saves money over the long run.
(2) It is not just an issue of the destitute not having health insurance. I had a friend here in the computer field who was far from destitute but she went without insurance for the better part of a year while she was unemployed. Fortunately, she was diagnosed with diabetes shortly after she had found another job. And, I know that I would have a heard time getting coverage outside of a job (or the COBRA extension) because of pre-existing conditions like kidney stones (and I am so far from destitute that I could take off work and live on savings for at least a few years without a problem if it weren’t for the medical insurance part).
(3) Clearly, getting into a health care comparison with Canada is getting pretty far off the topic. No doubt, rising health care costs are a problem that every country is facing. But, studies show that Canada spends much less of its GDP on health care as we do. In particularly, they spend a lot less on bureaucratic overhead. And, although Sam Stone is one exception, most Canadians would not trade their health care system for ours. When I lived there from 1992-1996, I had no problems with the health care system and I remember one of my roommates, who was pretty much a “Republican poster-boy” in the sense that he was a small business owner who worked like crazy and was making pretty good money from it, telling me that he couldn’t understand why the U.S. didn’t adopt a single-payer health care system like Canada’s.
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Sam, while I have more respect for you than many posters here with whom I almost always disagree, it was not hard for me to find this thread from about 18 months back.
In the linked thread, another poster basically did exactly what Sam just did here – found and linked to a study where a large number of economists condemned a candidate’s economic policy. In that case, though, it was Bush’s budget they were attacking. Sam’s response was to find a different link backing Bush’s budget, and offering this snarky rebuttal:
Sam, perhaps you’d care to explain if (and if so, why) Squink’s link below isn’t exactly as valid a response to your OP, as your quote was to the OP to which you were responding? Or why the OP back then wasn’t “startling,” “amazing,” etc. like this one is, given the similar number of economists and Nobel Laureates involved?
-P
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Or above, even, given how these things work. :smack:
-P
Obviously, I meant that the fortunate part was that she wasn’t diagnosed with diabetes until she had found another job. Getting diagnosed with diabetes at all is obviously not very fortunate. I should be sleeping, you know!
I don’t get it. This is coming from the Bush campaign, so I assume they are saying we should ostensibly vote for Bush because Kerry’s economic plan is so bad. Bush - the guy who has the worst record on defecit spending EVER, and what? the second-worst jobs record ever? That’s like Charles Manson saying, “don’t vote for the other guy; he’s a murderer.”
It is somewhat of a game, in that both sides can produce lists like this - however, the point I was making in this post was that there is a lot of unanimity among economists on the issues they specified in the letter = mucking about with special tax exemptions for businesses to ‘create jobs’ while eliminating the other guys’s special exemptions (distortionary), the value of free trade and globalization. Hell, even Paul Krugman, before he became a partisan hack, might have signed this particular letter.
There are other economic issues on which you can still find plenty of disagreement. But the value of free trade and open markets are among the most settled issues in economics. And Kerry is on the wrong side of those issues.
As for the ‘debunking’ the rest of these people engage in, how ridiculous. What they consider to be a tainted economist is one who has ever, in any form, said or done anything that can be seen to support Republicans or Republican issues. Hey, that guy was appointed to a board by Reagan in 1980! Stop the presses!
And of course, they try to denigrate their credentials by pointing out that there are some smaller universities and colleges represented on the list - which is what you’d expect when an open letter to economists goes out. You’re going to get them from everywhere. But there are some heavy-hitters on this list, including many representatives from every Ivy League school in the nation.
I also love how these economists can be completely ‘discredited’ by showing that they’ve ever had anything to do with a Republican, and yet complete partisans like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich are quoted as definitive sources.
Anyway… The point is that Kerry is wrong on trade. He’s wrong to ‘re-regulate business’. He’s wrong to oppose outsourcing. He complains about the deficit, yet the gap between his own stated policies and tax increases would increase the deficit by 150 billion dollars a year, while increasing the overall tax burden. His policies will not help the economy - they will hurt it. He’ll make things worse. Perhaps a lot worse. Trade policy is one area where Presidents have a lot of leverage - more so than even their budgetary policies. The wrong trade policy can destroy vast swaths of American industry. When annual trade is in the trillions of dollars, small changes to tariffs and regulations can have huge impact.
I don’t think that’s “settled” in any way, shape or form, Sam.
He’s not opposing outsourcing, he merely favours not encouraging it with tax breaks.
In his own words, just today:
Eh? Name one thing that Kerry has proposed so far that’s been actually protectionist. He’s proposed tax breaks and benefits for companies that keep their workers here, which can’t be significantly worse than Bush’s own record.
So, an open letter went out and 368 signed. How many received the letter but did not agree with it?
If there are only a few hundred economists in the USA, then the letter would indeed be significant.
If the letter went out to thousands, and only 368 disliked Kerry’s (and by inference, liked Bush’s) policies, then you have nothing.
If the letter went out to a subset of the USA’s economics experts, we need to know how they were chosen and how many they were before we can attach any significance whatsoever to this.
Sam Stone, if you really care about the true picture about the proposed Kerry and Bush economic plans, you would do well to check out the October 9th issue of the Economist, arguably the most respected and influential economic magazine around. For the most part, economists do deplore Kerry’s protectionist leanings but this is far, far, outweighed by Bush’s economic mismanagement.
However, they do give Bush admiration about how he refuses to capitulate on his free trade position, even when it’s costing him votes.
How many economists are there in the U.S.?
From the American Economic Association’s website we see: “Today the membership is approximately 18,000.”
So, out of 18,000 people (or more, since some may not be members of AEA), 368 have said that Kerry’s plan is bad.
How is 368 an “amazing” number, compared to the tens of thousands of economists out there?
Out of a group of tens of thousands, don’t you think it’s easy to find a subgroup of around 400 that agrees on just about any topic you choose?
A noble effort, Sam. But you should have known that your OP would encounter an immediate wave of hysterical rationalization. Your sources are too few. Their claims are ambiguous. The universities they represent are insufficiently impressive. They are lap-dogs for conservative causes. They aren’t Kerry himself. And frankly, had they been Kerry himself, it would have been the case that you misunderstood him. You must resign yourself to the fact that, because of the opinions you hold, you are unreasonable, belligerent, and recalcitrant.
Another pointless, sanctimonious drive-by from Liberal. What a surprise. :rolleyes:
What use is a high GDP per capita if so many of those capita are so much worse off in terms of poverty indicators, health and education than their EU counterparts?
That so much of the GDP is dished out to so few is economic coercion as tyrannical as any tax.
As opposed to your thoughtful and deliberate post, with so much meaning in every word that it is a veritable neutron star of rhetoric.
How childish of you.
Do you have anything substantive to contribute to this thread or not?
I posted an honest, non-hysterical reply with genuine questions, the answers to which would help us evaluate Sam’s side of the debate.