When you say “the people of Alaska” you mean “the people who are in power in Alaska” cause I bet there are a lot of Alaskans who would be all for UHC if they could get it.
They don’t get to vote for their officials in Alaska? Wow, that sucks, having a groundswell for UHC like that, and then the Man keeps them down.
I don’t know that’s a fair representation of the argument.
Politicians are just as “on the take” as they ever were. As the balance of money (power) moves upwards towards an ever-shrinking percentage of the population, political power also becomes concentrated in the hands of the wealthy few.
[QUOTE=Evil Captor]
When you say “the people of Alaska” you mean “the people who are in power in Alaska” cause I bet there are a lot of Alaskans who would be all for UHC if they could get it.
[/QUOTE]
Let me think about that…
Nope, that’s not what I meant at all. Last time I checked they vote in Alaska, though maybe they turned into a totalitarian state when I wasn’t watching (they DO eat whale blubber and play with polar bears, so who knows?). As for your bet, I’d take that bet. Ask people in Alaska (have you ever been there? I hear it’s cold) if they would rather have UHC along with the associated costs, or rather have that (IIRC) $2000/year check in their pockets, and see what they pick. I bet that the majority of folks in Alaska would choose the check. At a guess, most Americans would choose a check to having to pay more taxes and getting UHC.
Of course, if you craft your questionnaire as ‘would you like to have free UHC?’ then people are going to pick that.
-XT
Since we’re just guessing, I would guess Americans would take UHC over a $2000 annual check. Have you seen the price of private health insurance lately?
Don’t hate the playa hate the game. you playa hater
In the Rawlsian sense, I agree that disparity in and of itself is not a problem but gross disparities provide fertile ground for other problems.
Economics is not a zero sum game but the division of the wealth created by the economy is to some degree a zero sum game.
So perhaps income mobility is important and as income disparity increases, income mobility tends to decrease, it gets a lot harder to jump the gap.
Yeah but you don’t have to allow money to be directly translated into speech. If some wealthy plutocrat decides he can afford to spend all day on a soapbox, then fine but that is not what people are concerned about. Money talks here in DC. Money may not be able to push the most radical points of view very well because ultimately money doesn’t get to pull levers in the election booth but money can certainly move things quote a bit at the margins.
At the height of the Roman empire the top 1% owned 16% of all assets. These days in America, the top 1% owns about 40% of the nation’s wealth. I’m not saying that the pplight of the poor was better back then than it is today but the wealth is not necessarily evening out more. In fact welath is more concentrated even compared to a few decades ago.
Because if the current system seems inequitable enough to enough people, they may change the system.
Pfft.
As someone who thinks we should stick a spigot into ANWR and call it the strategic oil reserve and we should be running our own oil extraction operation on federal land. Its not like we don’t have the knowhow.
No but, it does help pay for a lot of social programs that would otherwise cause financial strains for a country like Norway.
I thought someone implied that America’s size alone was an impediment to universal health care.
Do you come to this conclusion because every country in the world that has UHC pays more per capita for their health care? Oh wait, it’s actually the opposite: The US pays far MORE per capita for health care than any other country in the world.
So I guess the choice for the people of Alaska would be to have UHC AND the check.
Where did you get the idea that UHC is MORE expensive than what you currently have? You are wrong. It’s pretty well known to be the most expensive system in the world, and the administrative costs in the US are particularly at fault
Why do you like paying more for administration costs?
Correct me if I’m wrong - are you saying that buying politicians used to be more affordable in the past and a much wider range of people could afford to buy one, whereas now buying politicians has become less affordable?
But within the past few weeks I saw a chart an economist had contructed comparing the mean wage over several decades with the mean rent for an adequate apartment. The apartment FAR outpaced the rise in income. When I look at how hard it is to be a young adult now in terms of expenses now vs then, I tend to believe that the necessities are harder to afford for the poor now than it was “then”. Clearly, what a single-income blue collar worker used to be able to afford, and now…
When someone claims that “socialism has always failed,” I like to point out that Scandinavian Social Democracy works well. Then people say that that does not matter, because they are small countries.
The success of Scandinavian Social Democracy, and of Social Democracy in general means that there are other alternatives to the American free enterprise system than what exists in North Korea or Cuba.
The pat answer from the Tea Party is, “They are going to fail. Because they are Socialists. And Socialism always fails.”
I swear, I have seen that answer on this very board.
If 55 percent of people vote for officials who favor the check and 45 percent vote for officials who favor UHC, you still have 45 percent who are not getting what they want. I know it’s democracy and all, but that does not stop it from sucking for the 45 percent.
Fair enough. But it’s interesting how selective certain segments on this board seem to be in when they honor “the voice of the people” and when they dismiss it.
Right now it seems as though it is the American free enterprise system that is not working.
It tends not to work well when there’s too much government interference.
Name an economic period since WWII which had both economic prosperity and low government interference.
Has the definition of an “adequate apartment” stayed the same over that time? I strongly suspect that what was considered adequate in 1950 would be unacceptable now.
In other words, if a system is failing, that simply means we are not doing it enough.
I think I’m beginning to understand the Republican economic plan; Tax cuts have led to a massive deficit, so the solution is to do MORE tax cuts.
Cutting taxes hasn’t led to a massive deficit. Massive spending has led to a massive deficit.
At any rate, a research paper By Harvard professor Alberto Alesina proves that spending cuts are more likely to increase growth vs. spending increases. (Tax hikes, obviously, have the opposite effect.)
Deficits are caused when spending exceeds revenue. Changing either, or both, can eliminate the deficit, or cause it to balloon. Claiming that spending and revenue are independent with regards to the deficit is just bad math.