US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2011

In 2006, California legislators enacted America’s first cap-and-trade program, which forced the state’s biggest polluters to pay into a fund for every ton of CO2 they pump into the atmosphere.

Nine years later, it has raised $1.6 billion—and the state has no idea what to do with it.

“This has become a Christmas tree of spending,” Bill Whalen, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, told the Los Angeles Times recently. “It’s like modern art. You can look at it and interpret it any way you want.”

The program works by capping the amount of carbon that can be emitted each year, then selling permits to companies that might exceed the limits. By law, all the money must be spent on projects that reduce emissions. The most prominent example is the state’s contentious high-speed rail project, which is now paid for almost exclusively through the fund.

But other lawmakers want to divert some of those funds to other forms of low-carbon transit. For instance, as the Sacramento Bee‘s Jeremy B. White writes, the California Natural Gas Vehicle Coalition, wants to buy more natgas trucks. Environmental advocates, meanwhile, want to expand bus access. And at least one group wants to build new ferry systems.

The fund recently got a major boost after lawmakers folded oil and gas producers into the program. White says as much as $3.9 billion in extra spending could now be available.

TL;DR: Accidental mockery and bio warfare
This happened a few days ago but there was a slight new development today.
A few friends and I decided to get a room at a pretty nice hotel in Grand Rapids for no good reason except to drink all day and hang around town. Things are going just great.
Later in the evening, we are heading down from our room on the 16th floor and an older man with shortish white hair and a suit is already in the elevator (access to the few floors higher than that are restricted by keycards).
He looks uncomfortable as one might if a group of obnoxious acting younger people who are clearly drunk and smell like weed got on the elevator with you.
I ask him what brought him to town and he says, "Well I'm running for president." I call bullshit, and say, "Suuuure you are." A friend says, "I'm positive you will get the fuuull support of today's youth. Espeeecially me." To which the man says "Well I sure hope so." We get off the elevator, he shakes our hands and we part ways.
One friend has been quiet the whole time then mentions, "You guys know Jeb Bush is in town. I think that was him." We look up pictures of him, have a moment of clarity: "Shit, we just mocked Jeb Bush to his face." None of us are republicans so this was a pretty funny fuck up to us. We laugh about it have a fun rest of the night.
This morning though, I get a call from one of these friends. He asks if I feel like I've been bitten by mosquitos. Actually I do. There were fucking fleas in our hotel room. I manage to actually catch a few trying to bite me. I've spent most of today washing all my clothing, bedding, and hair.
Then I remembered, we shook Jeb Bush's hand. There is a very real possibility we gave him fleas.

On May 29 2015 15:44 lastpuritan wrote:
What is funnier, his fake facebook account was named Jay Gatsby, he deactivated it so i cant click on his profile, but i logged every SMS he sent me. Only thing worries me that i punched him first, as a friend of mine told me this may cause trouble, plus my medieval-ish reactions by meeting him instead of calling the police. : D .. But i have dozens of proof that he wants me come behind a church, wheres a lurk area (saying so that no one can help me). My former lecturer confirmed his identity as a cop, but he doesnt know why he was using fake facebook accounts. Cops are hidden in facebook groups god knows why.

Thanks guys, im relaxed a bit.

On May 29 2015 22:22 hunts wrote:


You should go to the media about this, get a giant witch hunt on the guy for being a douche (Although if you're white they probably won't care much, but still possible.) Pretty fucked up that a cop would do that, but I guess not too unexpected.

Since Obamacare took effect, roughly 16.5 million more people have gained health insurance. And while the health care law is objectively succeeding in its key goal of expanding access to coverage to millions of Americans, those gains come with enormous costs to taxpayers — including inordinately steep ongoing administrative costs, according to a new study.

The analysis, published in Health Affairs this week, found that about $273.6 billion, or roughly 22.5 percent, of the total estimated $2.76 trillion cost of the Affordable Care Act through 2022 will go to overhead costs.

The authors of the study, Drs. David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, professors at the City University of New York School of Public Health and lecturers at Harvard Medical School, attribute the soaring overhead to rising enrollment in private plans, as well as the law’s Medicaid expansion. This year 9.6 million people signed up for plans on the state and federal exchanges.

The study also attributes the uptick in overhead to the high cost of setting up and running the exchanges, which are essentially brokers between the government and private health plans.

In comparison, the federal government spends just 2 percent in overhead costs on its traditional Medicare program.

The latest estimate breaks down to about $1,375 in extra administrative costs per newly insured person per year, according to the report. That’s “over and above what would have been expected had the law not been enacted,” Himmelstein wrote on the Health Affairs blog.

Some of the overhead will be added to Medicare and Medicaid programs, but most of it—about $172.2 billion—will come from private insurance.

The researchers acknowledge that expanding access to health coverage for tens of millions of Americans — as Obamacare was intended to do — comes at a high price, but they say that soaring administrative costs are avoidable.

“Insuring 25 million additional Americans, as the [Congressional Budget Office] projects the ACA will do, is surely worthwhile. But the administrative cost of doing so seems awfully steep, particularly when much cheaper alternatives are available,” the report says.

The researchers point out that Medicare Advantage, which also involves federal reimbursement to private insurers, also had “bloated administrative costs,” though in that case the overhead averaged 13.7 percent in 2011, or about $1,355 per enrollee. “But rather than learn from that mistake, both Democrats and Republicans seem intent on tossing more federal dollars to private insurers,” they wrote.

In the report, the researchers push for adopting a universal single-payer system, saying that it would significantly scale back on administrative costs.

Of course, adopting a single-payer model in the U.S. in this political environment is not likely to happen anytime soon.

Last summer, an effort by progressive lawmakers in Vermont to craft the first single-payer model in the country died off when liberal Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin, a longtime leader of the movement, realized it would cost his state more than it could afford.

Other states like New York are considering a similar model, though it will be an uphill battle.

On May 29 2015 15:03 Danglars wrote:

I'm giggling a little. My state's contentious high-speed rail project. So that's what they're calling it now.

Sixty-five percent of respondents report that their families are either “doing okay” or “living comfortably” financially

Forty-seven percent of respondents say they either could not cover an emergency expense costing $400, or would cover it by selling something or borrowing money.

Thirty-one percent of respondents report going without some form of medical care in the 12 months before the survey because they could not afford it.

Seventy-six percent of respondents have at least one credit card. Of those with a credit card, a slight majority (56 percent) report that they always paid their credit card bill in full in the previous year.

Thirty-nine percent of non-retirees have given little or no thought to financial planning for retirement and 31 percent have no retirement savings or pension.

On May 29 2015 23:54 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:


Yeah that's either inconsistent or the subjectivity/ social desirability bias kicking in (people might think/ act like they're better off than they really are). I'm particularly surprised with the statistic that half of respondents couldn't afford a $400 emergency expense though. Does that directly mean that half of respondents don't even have $400 saved in the bank? o.O

On May 30 2015 00:05 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:


That legitimately blows my mind.

On May 30 2015 00:15 ticklishmusic wrote:
KwarK is gonna be one of those people who lives like he's poor, works until he's 35 then QQs the fuck out of the system and everyone is going to be like WTF