US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1385

On November 02 2014 04:10 Leporello wrote:

The graph does show the USA -- look at the right side of it. Do you honestly not see it?
And it's arguable, if not blatantly false, that the USA's healthcare industry is more regulated than something like UK's NHS.

BUT -- while not more regulated, it certainly is the most bureaucratic healthcare industry in the world. It's just that the bureaucracy exists outside the government.

It's a prime example of how wasteful private industry can be if the market is completely taken for granted (and the need for healthcare is something you can always take for granted). There is all the incentive in the world to inflate the "need" for healthcare, and no incentive to actually shrink the industry for efficiency's sake. Business wants to enlarge, business always wants growth. You get giant middle-men industries. You get pharmaceuticals marketing themselves to the lowest common denominator of ailments.

Prisons, healthcare -- any service towards the basic necessities of life and society should not be given incentives and made to grow off of profit. Why can conservatives not see how awful this line of thinking is, that "private industry is always more efficient"? The truth is: inefficiency can be profitable, businesses are bureaucratic messes as much as governments are, and some markets are not meant to be grown and exploited, "free" or otherwise. Servicing society's miseries and ailments should ideally be something you need as little of as possible. You make prisons and hospitals things of profit, and all of a sudden you have a lot of "criminals" and "sick people" on your hands.

What do women want? Freud’s question, yet to be fully answered, has roiled the contest for what should have been a safe Senate seat in Colorado.

Thinking he knew the answer to that query is how Senator Mark Udall, the Democratic incumbent, could end up losing his job to U.S. Representative Cory Gardner, a conservative Republican who is otherwise on the wrong side of so many issues that matter to Coloradans.

Defeat would be a shocker for Udall, who belongs to a storied political family and easily won his seat in 2008, even though he was the candidate who’d had the most money spent against him.

Back then, he ran a normal campaign. This time, he has almost exclusively centered his campaign on women while getting us almost completely wrong. Unfortunately for him, Freud's question can only be answered in the negative: We know what we don’t want, and that is to be treated like ninnies, the sum of our body parts, captives of gender.

Udall and his consultants -- who should be drummed out of politics for malpractice -- are running a campaign way beyond its sell-by date. Legend has it that in 2010, his fellow Democratic senator from Colorado, Michael Bennet, won a close race by concentrating on women’s issues. Of course, we don’t know whether Bennet won because he ran on women’s issues or whether he won while running on those issues among others.

If there’s one thing women keep an eye peeled for it’s men who try to manipulate them. If you are trying so hard to pander to us on one thing, it’s because you are assuming we are one-issue simpletons who won’t penalize you for ignoring all of the other things we care about. Turn me into a Barbie doll voter, and I will turn on you.

More than half of Udall’s ads are about Gardner relegating women to second-class citizenship and his attempts to limit their reproductive freedom, including access to contraception. Gardner outmaneuvered him by calling for over-the-counter birth control, which neutralized the issue (despite the fact that it would cost women more than it does if it's covered by insurance), but Udall kept at it. In its surprise endorsement of Gardner, the Denver Post wrote that in an "obnoxious one-issue campaign," Udall "has devoted a shocking amount of energy and money trying to convince voters that Gardner seeks to outlaw birth control."

Udall suffers from a lack of colorful enemies to fight. Had this been 2012, he could have counted Republican foils such as Missouri Representative Todd Akin, whose bid for a Senate seat crashed and burned after he spouted bizarre claims about women possessing natural defenses against getting pregnant if raped. Sadly for Udall, what’s left of Republican discipline kept ridiculous candidates out and put a muzzle on anyone who snuck through and might make a peep. Look around for gaffes. There aren’t any.

The gaffes are on the Democratic side. Because Udall’s message hasn’t caught on, he says it louder, like a boor with an unfunny joke, and thus opened the door to outside groups to go even further. Up went an ad asserting that Coloradans wouldn't have access to condoms should Gardner win. Shortly after that ad, Gardner got a big bump in the polls. A SurveyUSA poll published yesterday by the Denver Post, showed Gardner at 46 percent and Udall at 44 percent .

You can see how Udall took a wrong turn: He’s right about Gardner, and can’t believe voters won’t see it. On the merits, the Republican doesn’t care about women’s issues. In 2006, Gardner opposed legislation to allow pharmacists to prescribe emergency contraception, and proposed disallowing Medicaid to pay for Plan B emergency contraception. In 2007, he opposed a state House bill requiring hospitals to inform sexual assault victims of the availability of emergency contraception. He favored “personhood,” until it wasn’t to his advantage to do so and seems to have gotten away with it. Gardner would still ban some forms of birth control, and supports a federal bill that would do the same.

Consumed as he was with pointing this out, Udall didn’t move on to exploit Gardner’s real vulnerabilities, not just among women but also with voters across the political spectrum. Coloradans care about the environment, and Gardner decidedly doesn’t. He’s not sure human activity has anything to do with climate change. One of his first acts in Congress was to increase offshore drilling in Alaska, promote fracking, cheerlead for the Keystone XL pipeline and weaken the Environmental Protection Agency. On other matters, he wants to root out nonexistent fraud in the earned income tax credit, and is against same-sex marriage and any tax increases.

But now, with his Kennedy teeth and hair and upbeat manner, Gardner is getting to define himself while Udall now looks like the one-joke candidate. Multiple visits from Bill and Hillary Clinton and one from first lady Michelle Obama haven’t moved the needle in his direction.

Meanwhile, Gardner is so secure he can have the combustible governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, in for a spin around the state. Fresh off his "sit down and shut up" tirade at a heckler and from setting his own quarantine policy, Christie looked on top of the world welcoming a new senator into the fold.

On November 02 2014 04:49 Nyxisto wrote:
Would you mind giving us an example of this Utopian free-market you are advocating or are you just speculating here? Also I have the feeling that someone has invited Noam Chomsky's fanclub into this thread, no matter what topic every second post is some kind of anarcho-libertarian fantasy scenario.

On November 02 2014 05:02 Vegetarian wrote:


The USA once had the highest standard of living in the world. It achieved this when the market was mostly free, and income taxes did not exist. I am not speculating I am using logic to explain capitalism. This is not a new idea, but an old idea that many seem to have trouble grasping. What is wrong with arguing for the system that results in the highest standard of living? Why are you attached to the idea that standard of living should be reduced to allow for the central planning of politicians?

On November 02 2014 04:49 Nyxisto wrote:
Would you mind giving us an example of this Utopian free-market you are advocating or are you just speculating here? Also I have the feeling that someone has invited Noam Chomsky's fanclub into this thread, no matter what topic every second post is some kind of anarcho-libertarian fantasy scenario.

On November 02 2014 05:06 Nyxisto wrote:
Are you kidding me? During the "golden times" of the US economy, namely the post war period, the US pretty much had the highest taxation in its history.

http://nickgogerty.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83454b17a69e20115711eec3b970b-pi

On November 02 2014 05:22 WhiteDog wrote:

You seem to be very confused about reading others. If you don't understand that a completly public system, like in UK or France, is less competitive than the US system I don't know what to say. It's a perfect exemple as to why increasing competition can lead to bad results.

Your point is that by increasing competition, you'll increase the standard of living, but you don't seem to understand that many things are not taken into consideration by the market. If you increase competition in energy production, you might have bad results : producing cheaper energy, and more energy, can have bad results on environment / energy efficiency in the production of other goods, etc. When you use your car, the cost of the gaz is the only cost you take into account, while the usage of your car has other impact on the society as a whole - by emitting CO2 and increasing asthma for exemple. In the same way, giving a better education to everyone is not market efficient, but it has great positive impact on the production (people work better when they are educated you know). An increasing competition can also lead to the total domination of a few firm on a market, if you let firms to whatever they please.

Finally, when you say that the market, through competition, leads to an efficient allocation of ressource, you have to BACK IT UP with either a logical argument or empirical data, which is what the supply and demand model is made for.
Economists showed that under certain conditions, the market leads an efficient (pareto efficient) allocation of ressource : this efficient allocation ressource is possible at one point, which is the equilibrium. This efficiency is not efficient in term of inequalities and such, in fact free marketist don't care about inequalities and there's no logical argument to say that a market lead to less inequalities. A non competitive market does not lead to an efficient allocation of ressource (because price is not defined by the confrontation of offer and demand in many situations) - which is the case for monopole, monopsone, oligopole, etc.
If the market does not follow those conditions, then it's not perfectly competitive market and thus does not lead to an optimal allocation of ressource. To say it in a simplier way, you need certain condition for a market to reach its equilibrium, which is the point that egalize offer and demand and that is the most efficient. There are no reason to believe that a non perfectly competitive market is necessarily more efficient than a government program : they are both not optimally efficient.

It really depend on the type of market : there are many markets in the world, not all the same. The energy market, the labor market, the banana market or the shoe market do not have the same externality and impact on the standard of living. Forcing for a higher competitive environment in all those market, without taking into consideration the complexity and the diversity of those market is stupid. Putting a chinese worker and an european worker in competition is also stupid : if it were not for the superior infrastructure and education of european workers, the fact that there are almost no laws in china to protect the worker or no laws to protect the environment, would inevitably lead to the domination of the chinese worker even if china's labor market has terrible effect on the standard of living.

On November 02 2014 06:23 WhiteDog wrote:

Almost no sector perfectly match a perfect markets defined as economists. The agriculture is one of the few exemple, and it's considered a disease because a perfect market have low profit perspectives. That the healthcare system is very far from it does not makes all other market more "competitive" oneofsanto.
And when people ask for "more competition", especially neoliberal, they usually talk about the legislation on the labor market, which is very far from a competitive market.

On November 02 2014 06:10 oneofthem wrote:
market defined by competition has a number of assumptions on the nature of the participants and their available options. many of these are not met by healthcare, so here private is not equal to more competitive. nor does this connection hold in many other situations

On November 02 2014 06:43 nunez wrote:
you are asking about the difference between an apple and health insurance?