Uh food assistance is provided. Are you against helping the poor not starve? Oh right you’re the guy who hates libraries, and is bad at math.
Yes canned meat is exactly like health care. Canned meat, insulin needed to live, all the same thing.
You’re completely talking out of your ass.
The worst part? You’re cutting off your nose to spite your face. The US spends a much larger percent of it’s GDP on healthcare then UHC countries, with worse outcomes. I say again Americans are getting soaked for worse treatment.
This makes the US a less welcoming place to set up shop. It drives jobs away. It hurts profits. The Rich™ would actually make more money under UHC.
So what would you like to tell the workers whom you’re incompetent, inefficient, and archaic healthcare system is taking the food right out of their mouths?
(bolding mine)
Really?
Most Americans have no access to water, electricity or decent housing?
The moment where your income gets you to the point where food is NEVER a concern, you’ve beaten 99% of those farmers. The difference between having 24 Ferraris and a 2004 Toyota Corolla is a trillion times smaller than that between the Toyota and walking 25 km to the next hospital.
P1. I have said several times that I am not against welfare to provide a basic safety net. That is a tiny, tiny fraction of the $$ being thrown about for UHC.
P2. No, it is not. The whole point of the canned meat discussion was that the poster was artificially constraining himself to the point where he claimed he was a victim, and that he had ‘no choice’, and therefore the government needed to step in to protect him, somehow.
The point is that his real objective is calories and certain amount of protein. There are a jillion ways to go about that. Buying canned meat is only one.
You can empower yourself to make choices as best as you see fit…by eating nuts and grains, by growing food in your backyard, by bartering with friends, by shopping at a different store. That’s only 4 choices I came up with in 10 seconds. The more of your own resources you are allowed to keep by the government, and the more choices you consider for yourself, you more you have empowered yourself.
Or…you can go the other route. By artificially constraining yourself to the sole option of purchasing canned meat (one product) in one store. And complaining that you don’t like the fact that it is not approved by the FDA.
Suddenly, you have no choice! And in that instance, the poster preferred to disempower yourself, and transfer resources from his own pocket to the government, to make that choice for him. Voyager also wanted the government to do the same for his mortgage, since he found the terms and conditions too frightening to make a decision on his own.
Don’t you see the big difference? In one example you can choose to keep your own money and make your own choices. In the other, you give the government your money and have them tell you what to do. One is empowering. One is not.
You are doing the same thing in your healthcare discussion. You are concocting scenarios - well above and beyond the basic safety net level - where someone suddenly is presented with ‘no choice’.
But the ‘no choice’ strawman is really a sum total of many, many individual decisions that you have already made. Plus, a healthy dose of victimization thrown in where you claim that events are out of your control, and you are buffeted by the terrible winds of fate, or capitalism, or the free market, or whatever.
P3. No, my friend, YOU are talking out of your ass. I would have thought that the meme that the US spends more on healthcare, but gets poorer outcomes, would have been destroyed by now. Unfortunately, it has not. I just heard our esteemed President launch that stinkbomb again the other night.
The very simplistic analysis that most people do is $$ spent on healthcare vs. life expectancy. Then they compare it to other, more supposedly ‘enlightened’ countries…usually the ones that people like to visit in Europe whilst sipping wine on a sidewalk cafe.
However, US life expectancy is skewed lower by car accidents and homicides…two things that have very little to do with healthcare spending. Once those factors are removed, the US life expectancy is tops. Its the Colisseum. Its the tops. It’s the Louvre museum.
Here is just one cite…you can Google for more and find lots more in about 60 seconds. It’s an editorial, but it references other studies
There is also some skewing that goes on because some of those other countries do not include a lot of infant deaths in their denominator, and the US statistics do.
In fact, once you make it to age 50 in the United States, you will outlive all of your fellow enlightened-country counterparts. And that beyond-50 lifespan is largely a function of healthcare spending and its effectiveness.
So sorry. Try again.
P4. That’s a nice assertion. But I think you need a little more than conjecture to propose taking over 17% of the US economy. Some facts, or even a little more rigorous hypothesis, might be nice.
Of course stats in other countries include deaths from malaria and diseases that are local too. The life expectancy includes traffic deaths in all countries. Kids die from childhood diseases and dysentery because they have poorer facilities. So quit picking and choosing your stats. Be honest and face that we don’t care about our poor our sick.
Except that it isn’t. Outsourcing has raised the standard of living in places like China and India. We haven’t become poorer. They have become more like us.
The countries that have large numbers of malaria deaths and the like have abysmal life expectancies. We’re not talking about them. Generally, the comparison is against OECD countries or G8 countries - similar democracies with reasonably similar standards of living. You’re throwing out strawman arguments.
The fact is, the homicide rate in the U.S. is much higher than the average for these other countries. So is the traffic fatality rate, for the simple reason that Americans drive an awful lot, and much of it is at high speed.
Wow. The level of utter, blinding, all-encompassing hatred on display here by our more… liberal (in the most vulgar sense of the word) is both astonishing and enlightening. Envy: the other, other, other white meat.
Seems to me if we just made a national property and liquid asset tax, took fifty percent of the richest people’s assets and auctioned them off then the richest wouldn’t notice any change in their lifestyle and everyone would be better off. No downside.
Wow, such a massive misunderstanding of economics and real world examples. I don’t know where to begin. Ok, how about you define richest? What do you do about transfers of wealth to other nations? Declare war?
You could also begin by pointing out that you would be auctioning the assets off to people who were perfectly well aware that, if they do too well, the government will steal them again.
It might drive down the bidding a bit, doncha think?
The problem in Zimbabwe was that the plantations were broken into private plots, which made them very inefficient, because the plantation owners kept the power tools. What they should have done was incorporate each plantation (most actually were, but family corporations) and divide the shares among the workers, Everything would have gone on as before, but instead of the owner shifting vast sums to Swiss banks, all the money would have stayed in the country, people would have spent money in shops, and they would have boomed.
Of course. If they only had undergone collectivization. It has nothing to do with the fact that the people who took over the farms had no knowledge or experience in agriculture.
When people bring up doctors ,they are missing the point. Doctors may a good living, but they are not the rich we need to tax. One percent of America has 90 % of the wealth. Those are the rich we need to soak. The argument that it is somehow bad to redistribute wealth is a joke. The repubs redistributed the wealth upwards. Why is that somehow better than redistributing it across the board?
Some rich actually have a conscience about what has gone on. Buffet says it is a war between the haves and have nots and the haves won. It is not a fair fight. They control the politicians and the message you receive on TV. I read that Buffet has formed a group of super rich ,who have some shame for what they have done and are going to fight for redistribution. A huge difference between the rich and poor has frequently resulted in violence. We are not exempt from that. We better fix this mess.
Then go and “fix it” by creating wealth. Nobody’s stopping you.
Invent a device that makes people’s lives easier.
Go write a book that people will pay to read.
Compose a song that people will pay to listen to.
Create a website that millions will want to visit.
Write software (videogames, business, etc) that people will buy.
There are infinite ways to gain money that’s more righteous than the redistribution nonsense. Many methods don’t even require capital – all that’s needed is your brain. But of course, nevermind all that when it’s easier to tax others instead of thinking of ways to contribute to society.
That is stupid. Do you think 100 million people can invent something and make themselves rich? Do you think every person in America who works hard to keep his head above water is a genius inventor just sitting on a billion dollar idea?
Money is made through money manipulation. we are making less and less products all the time. What great product did the financial genius and bankers come up with to get rich? They used smoke and mirrors to loot the middle class and the poor. That was their invention. We allowed it to happen again.
Of course not. But redistributing wealth does not make 100 million rich millionaires either. Imagine if we could dole out $1 million dollars to all 300 million citizens in USA. That would require $300 trillion total dollars. Obviously, that’s not possible since there’s only about ~$10 trillion in global currency reserves. Therefore, dismissing what I said is not even using the same standard as your utopian vision of wealth redistribution.
I don’t know where to begin. Ok, how about you define richest? What do you do about transfers of wealth to other nations? Declare war?