Like I said in the second post: No-one is going to talk about what’s supposedly dangerous about the democratic platform.
It will all be saying “It’ll be just like Venezuala / nazi germany (as Rand Paul did on the daily show), or a programme that is 100+ years old (as in your case)”
Why are we not comparing the ideas to, say, all the successful welfare systems in most of the developed world? That would seem to me the obvious comparison since they are right now implementing many of the ideas that progressives are suggesting the US should adopt.
The real reason (which I suspect you know but won’t acknowledge) is that thanks to Republican pro-business policies of the last thirty years, the American worker has been treated like toilet paper. Workers used to be something that companies invested in for the long term. Now they considered expendable in the name of increased profit for shareholders. And you can lay it all at the feet of St. Ronnie who burned unions at the stake.
Sorry, but I find it hard to take seriously a thread that talks about how destructive the Democratic platform is to the United States of America when the Republican in the Oval Office is shredding the Constitution and the Senate Majority Leader is handing it to him.
Even so, my uninformed opinion is that 100% of profits for any company making over $1bn and any individual making profits over $1m per annum still wouldn’t be enough to underwrite everything the Democrats want to do. Most of rich people’s wealth isn’t liquid. Plus there are consequences of taxing people that need to be taken into account.
ETA: And if there are specific proposals to downsize the Department of Defense, I would want to see them.
That seems totally irrelevant. Tariffs don’t pay for the Department of Defense, but nobody proposes to eliminate that source of revenue just because it doesn’t meet an arbitrary threshold.
I meant in addition to the other sources of funding on the 2016 DNC Platform document. So my uninformed opinion is that the 100% profits of rich people and corporations, plus cutting waste in defense spending, plus closing tax loopholes, plus a ‘financial transactions tax’ on Wall Street, plus the federal taxes and tariffs already exacted, still would not cover the ambitious Democratic platform.
He’s right though – no government in the world could afford to give its citizens medical care.
UHC might seem affordable, but what the fake news, anti-trump media won’t tell you is that in the worst cases, it can cost as much as 50% of the US system!!
So maybe they prioritize. Maybe some of the things don’t get done, or get done a bit differently. Perhaps the left and right work together and compromise to achieve some of the goals with the money available. A platform is an aspirational document, not a budget proposal.
Lol, Max S’s argument is effectively this: what the private sector provides is unprovidable.
Max, “profits” are irrelevant. Revenues are. And if we, say, take the revenues of the health insurance industry, add $5/day/American (which our world-class, exceptional private sector can do easily, accd to conservative wisdom), we can privatize the entire industry and have coverage for all Americans.
So stop talking about profits. It just hurts your argument. Look for revenues.
I don’t think it’s laughable. If the private sector “provides” everything on the Democratic platform, we wouldn’t need a Democratic platform, would we? I thought the whole point of calling in the government was to provide what the private sector cannot or has not done on its own. I’m not just talking about healthcare.
I meant profits, we don’t generally go wild on sales taxes but we tax income (profits). I think something like 90% of government revenue comes from some sort of income tax - payroll tax, individual income tax, or corporate income tax.
So I’m going with taxes on profits. Let’s say you take 100% gross income from the top 1% of American taxpayers. My wild guess on the total from that source is about half a trillion dollars, maybe a little less. My wild guess on the gross income of the top U.S. corporations is somewhere around two trillion tops. Put these two together and we have something like two and a half trillion dollars per annum.
There’s no way you can fund all of this stuff with $2.5 trillion.
I’m not assuming anything. I ran a q&d analysis on an Urban Institute study about Bernie Sanders’s 2016 health care plan, (link provided to my post, you may read the rest of the thread for context).
This?
Is literally a made up argument, complete with fake numbers which may or may not match reality, and has zero basis in this world and has almost nothing to do with the issues raised. And you admit it, “wild guess”, lol.
I haven’t reviewed Mr. Sanders’s health care proposal, and I probably won’t get to it for a while. I once made a thread asking for resources to learn about Medicare-for-all plans, but nobody responded.
I also crashed a thread on immigration reform, asked for some help producing a cost factor, then that thread died. I think there’s something I still need to respond to there, I have a draft of something lying around my office, I’ll get around to it eventually, because I genuinely want to know.
Anyways, I am not (yet) disputing that a Medicare for all plan costs as little as $600bn/yr. There’s also a lot more to the Democratic platform and I want to see all of it accounted for in at least rough numbers. Rural investments, urban investments, criminal justice reforms, education reforms, etc.
ETA: Quick search gives me an IRS paper (p. 9) that says the total income tax for the top 5% of Americans is some $3.8tn, so I’m way off there.