Prior to Loving v. Virginia my wife and I were forbidden to marry.
So hard to believe that took until 1967.
I work in healthcare. There have been huge changes.
The Clinton years brought in Insurance Portability, which gave us HIPAA, which codified patient confidentiality, and patient rights, among other things. Attempts to make healthcare more affordable also brought in HMO and PPO, which probably existed before, but they became way more common. The days when you could just go from doctor to doctor are pretty much over. My grandmother had doctors and prescriptions that her doctors knew nothing about. She didn’t think her heart doctor had any need to know what he lung doctors were doing. It was a nightmare to get her meds sorted out in the hospital.
The ACA brought insurance availability to more people. So we started to see people who had not had insurance come in, with stuff that they hadn’t seen a doctor for so they had a lot of stuff to deal with. It became harder for people to get in with both primary doctors and specialists. My facility had to replace the phone system we had because the old system could not handle the influx and melted down.
The ACA also brought in a requirement for electronic health records. This fundamentally changed how providers do their job, and how they interact with patients. It caused a lot of old school doctors to say 'fuck this noise" and retire early. I think it actually helped with patient safety, which is a good thing.
The requirement for escripting caused some old school pharmacists to retire and or stop taking medicare.
COVID is a whole other thing, which I’m sure many people will talk about. But these are just some of the things I have lived the changes.
Government programs that have been around since before many of us here hatched, we may just be taking for granted.
The very existence of the Food and Drug Administration was not always a thing. In the days of the Spanish-American War, when the food canning industry was still rather new, it was said that the food rations killed more American soldiers than bullets did. Canned meat was often canned in formaldehyde. The soldiers called it embalmed beef.
Upton Sinclair’s 1906 book The Jungle, although fiction (what we would now call “historical fiction”) created enough public outrage that Teddy Roosevelt began looking into it. This led, ultimately, to the creation of the FDA.
Today we take it for granted that our food will be safe (usually). Compare with the stories in recent years of poisonous dog food food and toothpaste from China due to the bogus ingredients some companies used to cut corners.
Likewise, Social Security has been around since before a lot of us were hatched. We take that for granted now. But conservative politicians have been trying to dismantle it since the day it was enacted. Sound familiar? If they succeed, that will also be a government action that may affect your life.
Congress created Medicare in 1965 during the Lyndon Johnson administration. Do you expect to receive Medicare benefits when you retire?
1978 Jimmy Carter legalized homebrewing which is how 90+% of craft brewers got their start. So you are drinking more than shit Miller, Bud, Coors you can directly thank the federal government. Also due to the craft brewers kicking the hell out if big beer big spirits have changed how they operated and generated a larger bredth of quality spirits.
If “well under $250k” means “more than $200k”, then you are in the upper 5% of American household incomes, or thereabouts. Add to that:
- White
- Heterosexual cisgender monogamists
- Not substantially affected by mental or physical disability
- Professional-class family lifestyles (college educated, white collar jobs)
- Ethnically “American” with all or almost all of your extended-family circle being US citizens
Then yeah, it is not going to make a lot of practical difference to you personally who’s running the government (absent some real crisis of dysfunctionality that started to look more likely in the Trump era, where some unqualified crony loon would be put in charge of some department and actually destroy its ability to operate, or start an actual war, or something).
The fundamental purpose of the US government has always been to foster good outcomes for people like you. Namely, (comparatively) rich, “normal”, “American” white people.
Careful with your assumptions. There’s a lot of ground under that $250k #.
Yeah, I know I’m privileged. And yeah, I wish someone would be able to take concrete steps to even things out, and make other significant gains. Instead, we get incrementalism and unfocussed spending, which pretty much just helps my investments (and those wealthier than me much more.)
I just got to thinking along these lines when my wife and I were taking about what differences we experienced under which presidents/Congresses. And I realized how tired I was of reading news about a $1/1.7/3/7 trillion plan. Hell, I have no expectation that any of the proposals will result in the meaningful change I desire. So I wonder why I should even pay attention any more.
I wish better for my kids and grandkids.
I know, which is why I put in the conditional “if”. I went with the provisional hypothesis that if you had meant “under $200k”, you would have said “under $200k” rather than “under $250k”, but I might have been wrong about that.
If your household income is more than about $112k, you’re still in the top 20% of affluence.
Answered your own question there, I think,
I suspect you live in a pretty nice suburban neighborhood. You’d probably hate it if someone built a crematorium next door to you. That’s why they have zoning laws (unless you live in Houston.)
Similar: Obergefell v. Hodges.
Well, if you like to travel I would think good roads and reliable bridges would be something you would want. And the expansion of broadband to rural areas may allow you to stay in touch with the family better while weekending at that cabin in the mountains.
Also, if the ACA were allowed to meet it’s original expectations, we might be living in a country where quitting your corporate job to start a small business, or retiring earlier would be a lot easier, less costly, and less risky.
Not really, as I’ve long questioned the benefit of my attempting to gain/maintain some level of expertise in such matters. The information is generally quite opaque, and the possibilities to have meaningful impact on matters - even on a local level - are often minimal to nonexistent.
So instead of reading the paper, I best care for my progeny by setting a good example, encouraging what I think healthy choices, and being generous with what I have.
Off the top of my head:
- The food I buy has a better chance of being safe to eat due to government inspection and regulation
- The water I drink is chlorinated and fluoridated under government regulation
- Cars are safer today because of federal regulations
- The roads I drive on are safer because of federal and state regulation, oversight, and regular inspection
- I don’t have asbestos or lead paint in my home because of federal legislation
- When I fly, I can do so safely thanks to government air traffic control
- My education was government funded, entirely up through high school and the university I attended is subsidized by state government
- I used federal student loans to send my kids to college
- I can watch television from around the globe thanks to communication satellites transported into space by NASA.
Well, that’s the thing about modern government. Unless you’re routinely receiving a check for $X from the government, pretty much every benefit will be “remote”. You’d likely only notice them when they failed to deliver.
You turn on the tap and get clean water that won’t kill you. How would you feel if your city suddenly ended up like Flint, Michigan?
There are a lot of people around who rely on welfare to feed their kids. What would the crime rate look like if they no longer had that, but still had to feed their kids?
And forget welfare, how much money does the US spend on military hardware and other supplies every year? How many companies would go bankrupt and fire all their employees if the US stopped buying all that? There’s a limited civilian market for guided missiles, after all. All those people would end up on the street (your street) looking for whatever they could find to survive.
The list goes on, others above have mentioned many other things.
Fundamentally, “supporting the existence of civilization” affects us all. Sure, we could conceive of other ways of doing that, but it’s likely they’d all require even more of our money, and a lot more of our time to carry out.
Right. Like I said upthread, I believe in the utility of public services. But the fact that the govt does many things that benefit me doesn’t really translate into motivation to pay more than scant attention to the ongoing ebb and flow.
To legalize something like this that you do in your own home, they must have banned it first. So I’m sure not gonna thank the government as a whole for this, though I might thank Carter-era politicians for fixing the problems their predecessors made.
Ah yes, that government action.