Fine, I agree with all that, but you stated that you can’t opt out of the school system, which is rather different to ‘you can’t choose not to educate your child.’ Who would choose not to educate their children?
What, so someone’s husband is ill, and has a decent chance of surviving with medical intervention - but has no chance of surviving without that medical intervention - and you think people should choose to let their loved one die? ‘Sorry kids, Daddy could survive, but I’d rather keep some savings in the bank, so say goodbye now!’
Why would you want a country full of people like that?
Er, because you’re advocating making the baby suffer.
Note that he said that you still have to pay taxes to the school system whether you send your kids there or not. Heck, I never had any kids and I still can’t opt out of the school system.
There is no baby - it was never born. Ergo, can’t suffer.
I’ve never understood the whole ‘the poor can make themselves rich’ idea. I’m not even talking about imbalances in ability or opportunity meaning that not everyone has the same chances of making lots of money - I’m saying that it just doesn’t add up. It’s like saying that everyone can get first place in a race, despite the fact that first place can only be awarded to one person. If everybody did manage to train as lawyers and doctors, who would clean the streets and serve the coffee? There will always be people who are poorer than average, simply because that’s the way averages work.
It was this line I was disagreeing with:
Which I guess was just poor phrasing.
You can’t opt out of the school system because you, and everybody else, benefit from having an educated future populace.
But you can’t wave a magic wand and make the baby never-born once it’s already been born. You’re talking about people with kids already as if the kids were just ideas rather than people.
Who said anything about the poor can make themselves rich?
Oops, sorry! I should know better than to comment mid-thread :smack:
I disagree but that is a whole other discussion, and has already been done here.
No, I am talking about people not even having babies unless and until they can afford them. Which I know is a completely non-popular idea these days but would certainly go a long way towards people not going into debt they can’t recover from. And a long way towards not needing UHC.
It’s amazing, and very sad, that when I say “don’t have the baby in the first place”, the translation is “of course there is a baby”. Why is it that the only right that is never threatened is the right of anyone, no matter how poor, messed up, violent, immature, to have as many children as they want? A society that claims to be concerned with the comfort and safety of it’s people allows anyone to have it’s next generation - heck, they encourage it, laud it, pressure it! Forget the octuplets, what is an unmarried, unemployed woman who lives with her parents doing with six children under seven, all concieved artificially?? Jay - sus.
Progressive taxing is an old principle in western democracy. The tax burden should be distributed equally. Clearly, the government should always protect property rights. This isn’t about taking from the rich; it is about the richest Americans paying a fair share to fund the institutions that allow them to prosper so the next generation will have the same opportunities.
Bill Gates is a good example because he grew up in a middle class home. His father went to college using the tax funded GI Bill and bought a home with a government subsidized loan. Labor was empowered to keep wages high. These social values promoted economic stability and social cohesion for a generation of children, including Bill Gates. Free from want and fear, Bill Gates thrived and made his fortune.
Yep, this seems to be the goal.
The money the wealthy don’t pay in taxes shifts the burden to everyone else. It’s not like we have authentic conservatives running the show. We have big government that likes to spend big money, just not on the public. The perversion of our tax policy, suppressed wages, and slashed spending on public services have made it increasingly difficult for low and moderate wage earners to meet their most basic living needs. It’s only going to get worse. The full weight of Bush’s Medicaid drug plan and tax cuts for the rich will soon be felt by most tax payers.
You are right. Health care is a class of goods and services. Most people think of private insurance and pharmaceuticals as market driven.
But the market model falls apart when you consider the amount of money the government spends to sustain private insurance and the pharmaceutical industry. Instead of a private system making government smaller it increases the size of government.
Pharmaceutical companies aren’t forced to compete in the market by investing in research to develop new drugs. Most research is government funded. Instead, drug companies spend more money copying drugs, suing over patents, and mass marketing.
There might be a few eccentric people who refuse health care, but most people want to stay healthy and live and keep their children healthy. Most people don’t think of health care as a choice; they think of it as a necessity.
You really think having kid is the number one cause of debt?
Our point about just not having babies is: the babies cannot make that decision. You want to punish the babies for the parents decision. You say well just don’t have babies. What is so hard to understand about the fact that babies cannot decide not to be born?
Or are you mandating some kind of legal method for preventing people from having babies who are under a certain income level? I find it odd that someone would rather have government control over their body than over a small part of their money.
And even if everyone was responsible enough to not have children until they were of a certain income level, or if there was a law for the same, people’s incomes change, jobs get lost, and there is nothing one can do to plan for every possible eventuality. It seems you only want people to have kids if they can save up enough money in advance to provide for the child’s entire upbringing before it’s born. That’s hardly realistic and would result in the speedy depopulation of the entire country.
I know, but it is the other way around. Social Security is only taxed on the first $78,000 of income. I think Congress may have recently increased the income ceiling but not by much. There are wage earners who pay more into Social Security than income tax. Any universal coverage needs to be well funded, which means the tax code needs to be overhauled. No one seems to pay taxes except the bottom 95%.
Handing people things for free is a whole lot different from funding institutions. I’m all for the rich paying their fare share, but I simply see no correlation between asking them to pay back into public institutions they might have used, and telling them they have to keep giving money to poor people, just because those people are poor.
His father was rewarded for serving our country - he earned it!
Artificially?
And golly gee, no one was getting free health insurance.
You think this is all he needed to do this?
Or maybe, just maybe, we could quit voting in so many things that require tax money!
Why not? Everyone focuses on mortgages and loss of job, but how many of these families in financial trouble have a pile of kids and/or started having them before they were financially secure? Children are expensive, particularly the way that most middle class folks raise them these days, so I can easily see that if folks go into having kids without a nest egg, they still won’t have one when the economy tanks.
What is so hard to understand about “just don’t have babies until you can afford them”?
OK, imagine 50 years ago. A girl that got pregnant was shunned by society and brought great shame to her family, who ususally sent her away to have the baby and put it out for adoption. Men waited to get married until they were done with school and established in a good job - i.e. until they could expect to afford to raise a family. Nobody had litters of children. Only homes and the occasional car were purchased “on time”. There weren’t really any luxury items you just “had to have” like flat screen TVs and Hummers. Children didn’t wear designer label clothes (neither did their parents really) or have expensive toys like their own cell phone. Teenagers got jobs after school if they wanted extra spending money.
Now we have today. 14 year olds are proudly having babies, some they planned to conceive, and keeping them. People get married in high school or right after and if they don’t have babies by the time they are 20, folks want to know whats wrong with them. A woman has 14 children, all by artificial means, and the morality question is can she make 14 kids happy, not “can she afford it”. All kinds of things are bought on credit and an amazing number of people don’t know how much extra that costs them, particularly if they only pay the amount suggested by the card company each month. Average families drive around in vehicles that cost $30,000 - $50,000 to buy and I have no idea how much to insure and put gas in. Their kids all have cell phones and texting is the in thing to do, but of course they don’t have jobs to help pay for their phone bills and expensive clothes.
This is where I would get into your handwringing over the “innocent children”. For some reason, you all don’t seem to be all that worried about all the “innocent children” that are born into abject poverty, are born to child abusers, are born to drug abusers, are born to girls who are just children themselves. No, you just want to make yourself feel better by spending enough money to keep them alive. And God forbid that I even suggest that maybe it would have been better if these children had not been born in the first place - somehow that is “punishing” them?
Well, there isn’t a whole lot wrong with a speedy depopulation up to a point…
Anyway, if people wouldn’t just jump to extreme conclusions they would see that is not what I am saying. Yes, feces happen and noone can be sure that they will always have the same income or even half that. What I am talking about are those people that are always skating on the edge, like the woman in my office who had kid number 4 because the other three were aging out of the kid baseball league that her husband liked to coach. They had declared bankrupcy about six months before they conceived kid #4 and she got laid off about a year after it was born. Nobody in the office (except me and of course I didn’t say anything) saw anything wrong with her having a fourth kid despite her fairly shaky financial history. Another (single) girl, living in a one room apartment and paying off a $30,000 debt, became pregnant just before I left that job and everyone thought that was great too. What is up with that? “Hooray you are about to take on a serious financial burden that there is a good chance you won’t be able to afford”. Makes no sense to me.
But, of course, you understand that the primary reason these things are different may well be that Canada has universal health insurance and the United States doesn’t.
Teen pregnancy is no more prevalent than it has been in the past. In fact, it’s been in steady general DECLINE for twenty years. Fifty years ago teenagers were getting knocked up all over, parents had kids they couldn’t afford (ask my Dad, whose parents had lots of kids they couldn’t afford) and teenagers were no more likely to have jobs than they do now - less likely, actually.
Things were not better fifty years ago and almost every old coot’s story about how they were is baloney.
Large families were much more common then they are now, hence the declining birth rate.
This is half true - the luxury items of the time were washing machines and normal TVs. Not sure what they’ve got to do with having children or not, though.
Same as they do now.
This is not ideal, but, in most respects, better than your ideal situation of mothers being ostracised and babies being abandoned.
You’re talkng about fifty years ago, right? Because the age for first marriage first child was way younger then than it is now.
I’ve seen both asked equally.
It is a little harder for kids to get jobs these days, with higher unemployment than there was fifty years ago and more jobs requiring high school diplomas.
Maybe in the states it’s different, but cellphones don’t have to cost a lot of money. The other things - well, yes, people shouldn’t buy cars that they can’t afford, but how many people actually do that? As in, how many people who can’t afford a car loan will even be given a car loan?
There’s nothing wrong with saying that maybe those kids shouldn’t have been born in the first place. But it’s really weird to keep saying that about kids who are already born, as though the kids will suddenly cease to exist if you say it twenty times. Family planning does not have a time-travelling component.
The personal anecdotes about a couple of your acquaintances don’t really mean much. You’re unlikely to know about all those people who chose not to have kids, and you’re extremely unlikely to know about those who chose to have abortions.
You do realise that no contraceptive is infallible, right? Well, sterilisation is, but that’s a pretty drastic move for most people - and, natch, something that people without medical insurance might not be able to afford.
Honestly I’m not even sure why you made that statement in the first place, so it’s hard to legitimately respond to. But it seemed as though it was your solution to the fact that not all kids have health care. And you were saying “well tough, if you cant afford health care, then you shouldn’t have had another kid”. And the problem with that is you are saying the parents were dumb, so let them reap the consequences, but in reality it is the kids, who were not responsible for their parents actions, that are reaping the consequences. You can’t tell the kids, if you wanted to be able to go to the doctor, you shouldn’t have been born. That’s just patently ridiculous.
I’d like to see some figures to back your claims. For example is there any evidence that companies like Pfizer have new drug discovery primarily financed by the government? Generally speaking “copying drugs” is illegal, when a company like Pfizer makes a new drug discovery (and spends around $1bn in the process) they get it patented and it becomes illegal for any other company to make that drug. There are many large generic pharmaceuticals companies that specialize in selling generic versions once patents expire (usually the original continues being sold as well, at a discounted but generally higher than generic price, once the patent expires.)
But anyway, I’ve said I think at least two times that I don’t consider our present health care system to be “free market.” I’m not arguing against socialized medicine, I’m just saying I’m not convinced a single payer system would necessarily be better for the United States at this point in time than our current system. If I genuinely thought otherwise I’d be fine with a single payer system; and if I’m wrong–good, I’d love to see our health care system improved.
The point is that basic needs must to be met before human potential can be realized, and without investment in the public sphere, this country will not produce the technology and science needed to remain competitive.
Public health is a basic need and public funding is the only alternative to a failed health care system. Unless you want to live in a country that only provides health care to those who can pay out of pocket which will eventually leave most people out.
I’ve read some interesting points in this thread & the Pit thread, & it’s got me thinking. While I don’t think America desperately needs to be saved from “socialism,” it seems that calling for national insurance is missing the necessary fix.
Doctors & hospitals benefit from a seller’s market. If we increase the supply of doctors, nurses, & hospitals, prices can go back down–& use of health care services will rise, meaning more preventative care–with or without national insurance. If we nationalize health insurance, we’ll still need to increase the number of doctors & nurses to get costs under control & serve the public.
Previous American generations did not declare poor to be unworthy of doctoring, even as they had customer-funded medicine. Yet somehow today, to look at our actions, we’ve apparently decided that medicine is too sacred to be sold cheaply & needs gatekeepers.
Is there a sort of lefty corollary to righty “Starve the Beast” politics going on? Are politicians & the AMA restricting supply to force this country to go to UHC? Or is it (& I suspect this is more likely, considering a GOP Congress capped med school admissions in 1996) simply not seeing outside one’s immediate paradigm?
Who is financially secure these days? I’m actually older than you are, and I can only guess that you have a rosy view of the past - more rosy than realistic. I’m not at all surprised that you don’t have kids, since you have no clue about what raising a kid is like. I had my first kid at 29, but I bet I wasn’t secure enough by your lights. I had a new PhD, a good job, but no savings and no nest egg. Sorry, it is impractical to have people wait until they are 40 to have kids to be secure enough for you.
Plus, even if you are in good shape when you have a kid, it can always change. No wonder you find it easy to save. My kids cost money, but they have already contributed to society and to the family. I’d rather have that than a bigger bank account any day.
Here is a pdf file from the Census bureau about age at marriage. In 1959 it was 22.5 for men and 20.2 for women. In 2003 it was 27.1 and 25.3 respectively. You may now apologize to today’s young people.
Here is a hint - around here it pays to research a claim before you make it - otherwise you look ignorant.
Here is a hint - there weren’t designer label clothes back then. Unless you count Levi’s. Plus everything is designer label now, even cheap stuff. There are more places for discounts now than when I was a kid. My daughter’s cellphone, btw, was free and costs $10 a month in our family plan. TVs back then were as expensive in terms of pecent income as TVs today - or more. I’ll let you prove otherwise.
Also, far more of my kids friends work after school today than my friends did. They have to. We were far from rich, but my father could provide for us and let my mother stay home when we were young. When she worked, later, it was because she wanted to.
I think our entire cellphone bill is less than the cost, in constant dollars, then a couple of long distance calls back then. In the good old days you rented your phone and paid every month. When I was in college I called my parents once a week on the pay phone. Now we can talk to our kids in college everyday for basically nothing - all free on the family plan. Not to mention the peace of mind we get from them being able to call us if anything happens.
So, would it been better if a boy born to a mixed race marriage, with a father who left, who had to be on food stamps for a while, never had been born? Children are precious possibilities, so let’s not let any go to waste no matter what you think of their parents.
Information concerning Big Pharma isn’t always easy to access because of laws that protect proprietary information. The U.S. Pharmaceutical industry seems to stake its future success on intellectual property rights and expects the U.S. Government to protect its claimed intellectual property rights globally. As you already know, it is expensive to research and develop a drug. It is easier to maximize profits with copycat drugs and by claiming intellectual property rights. I couldn’t find anything with Google detailing the specific amount of time and money used by drug companies to litigate patent infringement, but a quick search displays a plethora of lawsuits. And there are a few news sources referencing Pharmaceutical lobbyists assuring Congress it will stop the frivolous lawsuits intended to prevent a drug from going generic. Drug companies will sue just to extend the time a drug remains proprietary.
I agree that single payer is not necessarily the best way to fund universal health care. Considering the stigma associated with single payer, maybe an alternative funding structure will make it more palatable for people still apposed to the idea.
Bellow is what I could find with Google to support my post-- I bold typed information in the quote.
