Yeah, it’s weird. People don’t want to go do back-breaking work like build houses and grow food unless they’re compensated for it. And that compensation leads to ownership of things. And then someone comes along and wants to take that property that those people worked so hard to acquire and give it to someone else, someone who didn’t do any back-breaking work for it. People get angry when that happens. Weird, right?
Yeah, those fuckhead foreclosing bankers are the worst–they don’t build houses or fix houses or do anything tangible and yet they get paid two to three times the initial price of the house in interest for nothing more than allowing someone to use a bit of their money to finance the house. Then when they’re about to go bankrupt because they traded in shady ass loans they get bailed out to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars but the people who lived in the houses ended up living on the streets and the foreclosed houses sit there and rot and bring down the values of every other house in the vicinity. Then those houses get snapped up by the hundreds by hedge funds and are managed as rentals by property management firms–hedge fund brokers and property managers don’t do a fucking thing to build or improve houses either. They just charge exorbitant rents and keep the foreclosed houses from being affordable for regular people who then can’t even afford to rent the houses they used to own. And yet with all this it’s still considered unlawful to drag those parasitic fucks out of their offices and hang them from lamp posts even though when that gets done to Epstein they call it “suicide.” Too bad there isn’t an epidemic of banker “suicides” too, that would sure help the economy a bunch.
What would be the incentive for a physician to accept a patient with complex medical issues, versus cherry-picking only healthy younger adults who aren’t likely to need lots of visits and expensive care?
Do you have cites for any of these estimates?
I dunno. ISTR a recent article in The Atlantic, discussing how demanding (some? many?) US patients tend to be, while then failing to follow doctors’ instructions. Many meds and procedures are direct marketed towards patients/consumers, and patients rate their doctors on social media.
It’s not that hard to look it up yourself rather than demanding others do it for you.
Do you trust the FDA?
Business insider (2012)
Im saying a UBI should go to everyone irrespective of their current job status or any other issue. Disability payments included.
Not if we insist on not having control over immigration and our borders.
Countries like Denmark had to put up restrictions because they couldnt keep up their massive government safety net and allow in millions of immigrants.
So you want to move homeless people into $400,000 homes?
Show me where I said that or even implied it.
So you want the government deciding what you should eat and sending you a food basket each week based on the allocation they’ve decided for you?
Disability payments are part of the existing safety net.
Basically UBI will be funded by:
- Eliminating a huge chunk of existing tax expenditures (exemptions, deductions…)
- Eliminating a large number of existing safety net programs and
- Increased taxes
If someone gets disability via SSI I expect that program to be removed. If he gets disability via SSDI or Veterans Benefits I expect modifications–such that the person is not getting an extra $1,000/month–but is getting part of that [although as I said previously I am not familiar with the specifics of Yang’s program].
Food waste is not unique to the well off. For example I have a relative who is not at all well off. Yet when she cooks she makes a lot of leftovers. These go into the refrigerator. Frequently after a few weeks these then go into the trash. Another relative has kids who almost always take substantially more food on their plates than they actually eat. The excess food goes to the garbage.
Go into a grocery store. Notice how the produce is all close to perfect? Well they throw away the stuff which isn’t. If they didn’t they would get lots of customer complaints.
Farmers leave a few percent of their crops on the ground. If it can’t be picked up by the machines it is not economic for the farmer to hire people (or do it himself) to go along and pick up this extra food. [What farmers did a few decades ago was to let the livestock graze in the corn fields. Now with the specialization of agriculture they probably don’t have the livestock.]
Thus while there is a great deal of waste in the food system I don’t think the cause is primarily the rich wasting food and the poor can’t afford it.
The room analogy is simplistic in that it measures wealth purely in terms of money - and existing money at that. If I have $200,000 and pay someone to build a house, then when he’s finished, I have a house and he has $200,000. I haven’t lost anything, and he’s presumably made a profit. The builder is paying his suppliers, who are also paying their suppliers, and all parties involved are paying their employees, so even though there’s a set starting amount of money, it’s moving throughout the economy and generating wealth as it’s being distributed between parties.
Also, I believe the whole basis of Modern Monetary Theory is that the money supply is always expanding. Maybe I need to read up again on MMT again, but I believe it relies on the idea that money is not a fixed commodity. Basically, governments are able to issue money to pay for their operations, but have to ensure that their monetary policy is not inflationary. Taxes, rather than being how the government pays for it operations, are a method of preventing inflation. So theoretically, as long as inflation is held in check, the size of the tax deficit doesn’t really matter. Maybe somebody here can provide a better summary of MMT’s tenets. In the meantime, I’m sceptical.
Yes, because that’s the only way to handle the situation. Hallowe’en is over so you can put your scarecrow costume away until next year.
Good point. In Europe drug companies are not allowed to advertise, which cuts down on the demand for the treatment of whatever disease gets marketed this month. (Nothing new - Lenny Bruce did a bit on this kind of thing.)
Since drug companies have bigger marketing budgets than research budgets, this should reduce drug costs by a bit and spur innovation.
Anyhow doctors can say no - but if it is profitable for doctors to say yes, (like the small subset of doctors responsible for a lot of opioid prescriptions) it is tougher.
Right. Because planned economies and government programs that mandate personal behaviour have such a great history of success. But hey, go ahead and let the government decide how much food you can buy. I’m sure they won’t expand that into other areas of control such as how often you can fly, or whether you can decide to send your kid to a private school. Never mind who you can sleep with, what books you can read, or if the brands you like have been approved by the state consumer oversight committee.
Why? I don’t see a reason the disabled should lead a better life than the lazy. The idea here is to create a floor that gives people an acceptable minimum life. That means that some people, either through their own fault or through no fault of their own, will live at the floor level. After that most people will work to create a better life for themselves than that floor level not everyone will or will want to do that and that is OK.
It is a reasonable argument where to set that minimum acceptable living standard. I guess it is also reasonable argument that we should provide a better lifestyle to those who are at the minimum through no fault of there own though once we get to the point of deciding who is there through their own fault or not were back to a higher level of government intervention that I would prefer.
On the other hand you seem to want to keep the current saftey net in full force and then add UBI on top of it and that is just silly since it doubles (at least) the expenditures in the system. I guess silly is the wrong term but it does seem you’d be better off arguing that the floor for UBI needs to be raised if it’s enacted since it would accomplish the same thing.
Not sure why you’re quoting me when your response has literally nothing to do with what I said but if you’re having fun you just keep right on fuckin’ that chicken, good sir or ma’am.