In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up!
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On March 11 2017 01:14 chocorush wrote: The systematically poor don't invest in themselves.
I don't know about actual percentages, but it's just common sense that most people that have an easy alternative that will result in them being less poor will take it. There's rarely an easy alternative, especially if you're poor, and most ways to improve one's living require sacrifices in the current time period for gains in the future. People are really bad at valuing future gains over current gains.
Here are things that poor people have a tendency to do/be:
Are uneducated, resulting in all sorts of preventable predicaments, like having children you can't afford or getting sick because of bad health practices.
Use windfalls on luxury goods to treat themselves rather than accumulating wealth to invest. Poor people still buy expensive things like alcohol and cigarettes.
Commit crimes > terrible way to tax your future earnings for immediate gains.
Reliant on some sort of welfare and are faced with choices like working more and losing benefits.
Have cable tv. This is one of those things that I consider such a bad value for the money spent, but something about American culture just makes this a must have expenditure across all classes even when there are better alternatives.
Get obsessed over get rich schemes like lottery tickets and gambling.
Many of these things are choices even middle class and wealthy people make, but are even more detrimental when you're poor. Clearly there's meaningful discussion about how much of these types of things can actually be changed by individual choice, but for most poor people, there is room for improvement. Maybe not enough to fix things in one generation, but certainly enough to make a notable difference over time.
I worked in probation dealing with mostly poor people who committed minor crimes. And after that did a lot of work for landlord dealing with tenants who didn’t pay their rent. My wife worked in nonprofit housing and credit counseling for over a decade. If you talk to most folks that are poor and tell them there is room for improvement in how they live their lives, they will tell you “No shit asshole.” Getting into the dirt and fixing people’s lives is hard work with a lot of setbacks. And it isn’t twice as depressing when it’s your own life. Telling people to “try harder” and “make better decisions” isn’t helpful and does not get to the root of the problem.
On March 11 2017 01:14 chocorush wrote: Reliant on some sort of welfare and are faced with choices like working more and losing benefits. .
This one is particularly interesting because unlike the others, it is Not something middle class/rich people do (with some weird exceptions of people that turn down a raise to avoid getting into a higher tax bracket).
Because society created welfare as that system.
That is true, though it's important to note that most welfare or welfare-type programs (like TANF, SNAP, and WIC, to name a few) also tie into Medicaid eligibility, which is the primary reason why most on the benefits line opt for staying under the threshold. This is why moving to a single payer system or at the very least a merging of medicare and medicaid would do wonders for breaking down the margin game as its played right now. Couple that with effective rate-focused reform more generally and maybe things will look a little less shitty
On March 11 2017 01:14 chocorush wrote: Reliant on some sort of welfare and are faced with choices like working more and losing benefits. .
This one is particularly interesting because unlike the others, it is Not something middle class/rich people do (with some weird exceptions of people that turn down a raise to avoid getting into a higher tax bracket).
Because society created welfare as that system.
That is true, though it's important to note that most welfare or welfare-type programs (like TANF, SNAP, and WIC, to name a few) also tie into Medicaid eligibility, which is the primary reason why most on the benefits line opt for staying under the threshold. This is why moving to a single payer system or at the very least a merging of medicare and medicaid would do wonders for breaking down the margin game as its played right now. Couple that with effective rate-focused reform more generally and maybe things will look a little less shitty
Well I'd agree there, the problem is we have ~6 separate "entitlement" systems in the US
Welfare (multiple parts)-poor Social Security-old
and then 4 for Health care Medicare-old ACA-non regularly employed Medicaid-poor Employer deduction-employed
The ones for "poor" have that welfare trap effect
It would be best if they could merge all 4 of the medical into one (at least combine Medicaid+ACA into one so that they can tell their conservative wing the net eliminated one "entitlement"...while leaving alone the two medical entitlements that are 3rd rails)
(same for Welfare and Social Security... one single base amount of money... the more you work and put in over time, the more you get to get out of it)
On March 11 2017 01:14 chocorush wrote: The systematically poor don't invest in themselves.
I don't know about actual percentages, but it's just common sense that most people that have an easy alternative that will result in them being less poor will take it. There's rarely an easy alternative, especially if you're poor, and most ways to improve one's living require sacrifices in the current time period for gains in the future. People are really bad at valuing future gains over current gains.
Here are things that poor people have a tendency to do/be:
Are uneducated, resulting in all sorts of preventable predicaments, like having children you can't afford or getting sick because of bad health practices.
Use windfalls on luxury goods to treat themselves rather than accumulating wealth to invest. Poor people still buy expensive things like alcohol and cigarettes.
Commit crimes > terrible way to tax your future earnings for immediate gains.
Reliant on some sort of welfare and are faced with choices like working more and losing benefits.
Have cable tv. This is one of those things that I consider such a bad value for the money spent, but something about American culture just makes this a must have expenditure across all classes even when there are better alternatives.
Get obsessed over get rich schemes like lottery tickets and gambling.
Many of these things are choices even middle class and wealthy people make, but are even more detrimental when you're poor. Clearly there's meaningful discussion about how much of these types of things can actually be changed by individual choice, but for most poor people, there is room for improvement. Maybe not enough to fix things in one generation, but certainly enough to make a notable difference over time.
I worked in probation dealing with mostly poor people who committed minor crimes. And after that did a lot of work for landlord dealing with tenants who didn’t pay their rent. My wife worked in nonprofit housing and credit counseling for over a decade. If you talk to most folks that are poor and tell them there is room for improvement in how they live their lives, they will tell you “No shit asshole.” Getting into the dirt and fixing people’s lives is hard work with a lot of setbacks. And it isn’t twice as depressing when it’s your own life. Telling people to “try harder” and “make better decisions” isn’t helpful and does not get to the root of the problem.
Make better decisions isn't helpful only because people don't want to, even if they know what the better decision is and have the means to do it. People can normalize crises and tell themselves that this is just the way the world is. The family that always pays their rent, but always pays it a week late, clearly do not have a money problem. Not only can they afford to make the payment monthly, they can afford to overpay by 20% each month. If every month they owe $1,000 by the 3rd and every month they generate $1,200 to pay rent, making a payment of $1,200 on the 10th, that's not a money problem, that's a planning problem. And yet a lot of families live like that.
Again, returning to my central point, the Republicans are right that in a lot of cases the problems are largely avoidable through personal responsibility. Where they lose me is when they turn "well this wouldn't be a problem if only..." into a national policy platform. It sucks that we need low income housing policies in a world where low income families artificially increase their own housing costs through laziness, ignorance and learned helplessness. But that's the world we live in so we do need those policies. I'm a socialist because many societal problems need centralized responses using the collective resources of the people, but I really wish that they didn't.
On March 11 2017 01:45 Krikkitone wrote: The ones for "poor" have that welfare trap effect
I certainly know a few people who are afraid to earn more money because it would mean that they have to pay for their own healthcare now.
If you want to go ahead and let them know that healthcare eligibility under the ACA and Medicaid is decided by MAGI, not GI, they can assuage those fears. The only way to manipulate GI is to reduce or increase your total income and once you've earned a dollar of GI you can't unearn it. MAGI is much more flexible. If your MAGI is too high you can unearn quite a few dollars to get it back down to where it should be.
Not that I think it's especially reasonable that you'd need to know that in order to keep your healthcare, but it's worth knowing that because it is need to know stuff. If you're poor and you're turning down overtime because you're worried about your healthcare being cut off if your GI gets too high then knowing that MAGI, not GI, is the magic number is pretty handy.
edit: Played with the form a bit and it turns out I could quite easily qualify myself for Obamacare tax credits to subsidize my health insurance if I wanted to go that route. What the world really needs is more accountants. Well, that or significantly fewer, I think accountants spend a lot of their time solving problems created by accountants.
To give a hypothetical example, if your family makes $30,000 and will lose their ACA credits if they earn $30,001 then obviously making an extra dollar isn't worth it. Therefore they should decline additional paid work when offered. However if they instead take the work and defer the income then not only do they remain eligible for their ACA coverage but they also get to realize 50% of that income today, assuming they had not already maxed out the Saver's Credit (unlikely).
Here's why. If you pick up a part time job that gives you an extra $3,000 through the year and put that into a designated account for healthcare or retirement then while your GI goes up by $3,000 your AGI doesn't go up a cent. If you chose retirement then the government will actually pay you to do that to the tune of 50% of whatever you saved (capped at $2,000 or whatever your total tax obligation was that year, the lower of the two). Getting a tax credit from the government isn't income so you don't need to pay tax on that. Because ACA credits are refundable they're not impacted by this, you get them either way. The magic happens because someone with a GI of $30,000 and an AGI of $30,000 actually owes more in tax than someone with a GI of $33,000 and an AGI of $30,000. You can't keep the cash from the extra work without going over the limit, but what you can do is stash the cash, reduce your tax obligation and spend the tax benefits.
TLDR: If you offer someone on Medicaid the opportunity to earn another $3,000 then they can absolutely accept it, even if they're close to the income limits for Medicaid, as long as they're content with only spending $1,500 of the $4,500 and investing the other $3,000.
On March 11 2017 01:14 chocorush wrote: The systematically poor don't invest in themselves.
I don't know about actual percentages, but it's just common sense that most people that have an easy alternative that will result in them being less poor will take it. There's rarely an easy alternative, especially if you're poor, and most ways to improve one's living require sacrifices in the current time period for gains in the future. People are really bad at valuing future gains over current gains.
Here are things that poor people have a tendency to do/be:
Are uneducated, resulting in all sorts of preventable predicaments, like having children you can't afford or getting sick because of bad health practices.
Use windfalls on luxury goods to treat themselves rather than accumulating wealth to invest. Poor people still buy expensive things like alcohol and cigarettes.
Commit crimes > terrible way to tax your future earnings for immediate gains.
Reliant on some sort of welfare and are faced with choices like working more and losing benefits.
Have cable tv. This is one of those things that I consider such a bad value for the money spent, but something about American culture just makes this a must have expenditure across all classes even when there are better alternatives.
Get obsessed over get rich schemes like lottery tickets and gambling.
Many of these things are choices even middle class and wealthy people make, but are even more detrimental when you're poor. Clearly there's meaningful discussion about how much of these types of things can actually be changed by individual choice, but for most poor people, there is room for improvement. Maybe not enough to fix things in one generation, but certainly enough to make a notable difference over time.
I worked in probation dealing with mostly poor people who committed minor crimes. And after that did a lot of work for landlord dealing with tenants who didn’t pay their rent. My wife worked in nonprofit housing and credit counseling for over a decade. If you talk to most folks that are poor and tell them there is room for improvement in how they live their lives, they will tell you “No shit asshole.” Getting into the dirt and fixing people’s lives is hard work with a lot of setbacks. And it isn’t twice as depressing when it’s your own life. Telling people to “try harder” and “make better decisions” isn’t helpful and does not get to the root of the problem.
Make better decisions isn't helpful only because people don't want to, even if they know what the better decision is and have the means to do it. People can normalize crises and tell themselves that this is just the way the world is. The family that always pays their rent, but always pays it a week late, clearly do not have a money problem. Not only can they afford to make the payment monthly, they can afford to overpay by 20% each month. If every month they owe $1,000 by the 3rd and every month they generate $1,200 to pay rent, making a payment of $1,200 on the 10th, that's not a money problem, that's a planning problem. And yet a lot of families live like that.
Again, returning to my central point, the Republicans are right that in a lot of cases the problems are largely avoidable through personal responsibility. Where they lose me is when they turn "well this wouldn't be a problem if only..." into a national policy platform. It sucks that we need low income housing policies in a world where low income families artificially increase their own housing costs through laziness, ignorance and learned helplessness. But that's the world we live in so we do need those policies. I'm a socialist because many societal problems need centralized responses using the collective resources of the people, but I really wish that they didn't.
One of the problems I have with the Republican/Conservative view on personal responsibility, is that they take a very hands off approach. They desire people to take more personal responsibility, but are uninterested in providing services to teach people those skills. Or get involved themselves. It always seems like they want to avoid being exposed to the reality that what they want is really hard accomplish. And is filled with disappointment for all parties.
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) admitted Friday that the Congressional Budget Office will likely estimate that millions of people would lose health insurance under the GOP's proposed health care bill.
But he said that the the bill wasn’t meant to address the “beauty contest” of increasing coverage.
“We always know, you’re never going to win a coverage beauty contest when it’s free market versus government mandates,” Ryan told radio host Hugh Hewitt, after Hewitt floated the possibility that the CBO would estimate 15 million people will lose health insurance because of the American Health Care Act.
He was referring in part to the Obamacare's mandate that individuals purchase insurance, and the tax penalties it imposes on those who don't. But the law also provides more government assistance to buy care than the Republicans' alternative, which provides tax credits based mostly on age.
“If the government says, ‘Thou shall buy our health insurance,’ the government estimates are going to say people will comply and it will happen. And when you replace that with, ‘We’re going to have a free market and you buy what you want to buy,’ they’re going to say not nearly as many people are going to do that,” Ryan continued. “That’s just going to happen. And so you’ll have those coverage estimates. We assume that’s going to happen. That’s not our goal. Our goal is not to show a pretty piece of paper that says, ‘We’re mandating great things for Americans.’
“We’re not going to get into a bidding war with the left about how much we can mandate, or put entitlements out there for people,” he said later.
Paul isn’t the first to discredit the CBO’s coverage estimates as a legitimate measure of the success of health care legislation.
The director of the Office of Management said Wednesday that “insurance is not really the end goal here.”
“So we’re choosing instead to look at what we think is more important to ordinary people: Can they afford to go to the doctor?” he added later.
And Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, the White House’s point person on the legislation, granted later that day that it was the legislation’s “goal” to provide insurance for all at a lower cost – Trump’s promise of the bill – but said the priority was cost.
“I would suggest to Martha that what our desire is, is to make sure certain you are the individual that is able to select the physician and the treatment that you desire for yourself, not that the government dictates to you,” Price said, responding to a woman who stood to lose thousands of dollars in government health care subsidies.
In his interview with Hewitt, Ryan also agreed that the ACHA’s eventual capping of Medicaid was the largest change to federal entitlements in his lifetime.
“We’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars a year,” he said. “This is so much bigger, by orders of magnitude, than [the] welfare reform [of 1996].”
Thank god the Senate Republicans don’t seem to be buying Ryan’s bullshit and are not willing to tank the economy and health care industry just to get re-elected.
On March 11 2017 02:11 Plansix wrote: Thank god the Senate Republicans don’t seem to be buying Ryan’s bullshit and are not willing to tank the economy and health care industry just to get re-elected.
the difference is that senate republicans are elected by the whole state, not some cutely shaped gerrymandered district. they know repealing the ACA will ABSOLUTELY piss off enough constituents to threaten their seats.
On March 11 2017 01:14 chocorush wrote: Reliant on some sort of welfare and are faced with choices like working more and losing benefits. .
This one is particularly interesting because unlike the others, it is Not something middle class/rich people do (with some weird exceptions of people that turn down a raise to avoid getting into a higher tax bracket).
Because society created welfare as that system.
That is true, though it's important to note that most welfare or welfare-type programs (like TANF, SNAP, and WIC, to name a few) also tie into Medicaid eligibility, which is the primary reason why most on the benefits line opt for staying under the threshold. This is why moving to a single payer system or at the very least a merging of medicare and medicaid would do wonders for breaking down the margin game as its played right now. Couple that with effective rate-focused reform more generally and maybe things will look a little less shitty
Well I'd agree there, the problem is we have ~6 separate "entitlement" systems in the US
Welfare (multiple parts)-poor Social Security-old
and then 4 for Health care Medicare-old ACA-non regularly employed Medicaid-poor Employer deduction-employed
The ones for "poor" have that welfare trap effect
It would be best if they could merge all 4 of the medical into one (at least combine Medicaid+ACA into one so that they can tell their conservative wing the net eliminated one "entitlement"...while leaving alone the two medical entitlements that are 3rd rails)
(same for Welfare and Social Security... one single base amount of money... the more you work and put in over time, the more you get to get out of it)
On March 11 2017 01:45 Krikkitone wrote: The ones for "poor" have that welfare trap effect
I certainly know a few people who are afraid to earn more money because it would mean that they have to pay for their own healthcare now.
"Welfare" as we typically think of it, where poor people get money when they become unemployed, hasn't existed since 1996.
But yeah, I agree that any social safety nets that vanish as soon as you make too much money are counter-productive. So here's an easy fix for all of that:
1. Single-payer healthcare. [Until we get to that point, I could envision a system where whenever you're uninsured for any reason whatsoever, you're automatically enrolled in Medicaid.] 2. A guaranteed basic income/negative income tax. [This would replace unemployment insurance, food stamps, and social security.] 3. Emergency/disaster relief that is guaranteed for a certain period of time, and doesn't disappear when you reach a certain income level.
Personal responsibility is for luxury. If you want to work 14 hours a day, like Kwark, go ahead. Use that extra income to buy your iphone. Don't use it to be allowed to live if you get treatable cancer.
If all the people that are living below the poverty line in the States suddenly increase their skillset or their working hours, the economy would simply adjust. There is not enough work for everyone to work 10 hours shifts and if everyone knows spanish and english, you won't get payed more for that.
Every society needs to define what is expected from a member to receive the basic benefits of the society. In most of Europe, you need to be alive to be allowed basic human rights to food, health, housing. Everyone that is alive can with his skillset produce enough value to get those benefits. In the US apparently people that work 10 or more hours a days do not, because they have the wrong jobs.
I have no idea how anybody can justify that. I am having a 40 hours week and i usually work a little less, because i am lazy. Once i leave the door, i forget anything that revolves around making money. I don't even fill out my tax return forms to get money from the government back, because i am too lazy for that. I have no idea why someone that works longer then me, harder then me and has to feed more people not have the same rights i do just because he or she does not have the skills that i have or wasn't able to develop those skills in her/his youth due to environmental reasons. Even if some of them made bad decisions leading them there and are now as lazy as i am, they should still be able to fucking live.
Why would they want their own bill to fail? Well, consider the predicament they’re in. Republicans have spent seven years promising to repeal and replace Obamacare. They won election after election atop that vow. But now that they have the power to make good, they’ve run into three problems. First, Obamacare has become popular. Second, they don’t have an alternative plan that would make good on their promise to provide more people with more generous health care at lower cost. Third, implementing a repeal-and-replace plan — with all the complexity and disruption that entails — will drown the rest of the GOP’s agenda, and perhaps its congressional majority. Arguably, the best outcome for Republicans is to try — hard — and fail.
Why would they want their own bill to fail? Well, consider the predicament they’re in. Republicans have spent seven years promising to repeal and replace Obamacare. They won election after election atop that vow. But now that they have the power to make good, they’ve run into three problems. First, Obamacare has become popular. Second, they don’t have an alternative plan that would make good on their promise to provide more people with more generous health care at lower cost. Third, implementing a repeal-and-replace plan — with all the complexity and disruption that entails — will drown the rest of the GOP’s agenda, and perhaps its congressional majority. Arguably, the best outcome for Republicans is to try — hard — and fail.
I've seen that argument elsewhere. It's not a bad one, and is probably most likely explanation. The alternative is that Paul Ryan is a policy moron, which I'm not quite willing to rule out given his debate performance in 2012.
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) admitted Friday that the Congressional Budget Office will likely estimate that millions of people would lose health insurance under the GOP's proposed health care bill.
But he said that the the bill wasn’t meant to address the “beauty contest” of increasing coverage.
“We always know, you’re never going to win a coverage beauty contest when it’s free market versus government mandates,” Ryan told radio host Hugh Hewitt, after Hewitt floated the possibility that the CBO would estimate 15 million people will lose health insurance because of the American Health Care Act.
He was referring in part to the Obamacare's mandate that individuals purchase insurance, and the tax penalties it imposes on those who don't. But the law also provides more government assistance to buy care than the Republicans' alternative, which provides tax credits based mostly on age.
“If the government says, ‘Thou shall buy our health insurance,’ the government estimates are going to say people will comply and it will happen. And when you replace that with, ‘We’re going to have a free market and you buy what you want to buy,’ they’re going to say not nearly as many people are going to do that,” Ryan continued. “That’s just going to happen. And so you’ll have those coverage estimates. We assume that’s going to happen. That’s not our goal. Our goal is not to show a pretty piece of paper that says, ‘We’re mandating great things for Americans.’
“We’re not going to get into a bidding war with the left about how much we can mandate, or put entitlements out there for people,” he said later.
Paul isn’t the first to discredit the CBO’s coverage estimates as a legitimate measure of the success of health care legislation.
The director of the Office of Management said Wednesday that “insurance is not really the end goal here.”
“So we’re choosing instead to look at what we think is more important to ordinary people: Can they afford to go to the doctor?” he added later.
And Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, the White House’s point person on the legislation, granted later that day that it was the legislation’s “goal” to provide insurance for all at a lower cost – Trump’s promise of the bill – but said the priority was cost.
“I would suggest to Martha that what our desire is, is to make sure certain you are the individual that is able to select the physician and the treatment that you desire for yourself, not that the government dictates to you,” Price said, responding to a woman who stood to lose thousands of dollars in government health care subsidies.
In his interview with Hewitt, Ryan also agreed that the ACHA’s eventual capping of Medicaid was the largest change to federal entitlements in his lifetime.
“We’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars a year,” he said. “This is so much bigger, by orders of magnitude, than [the] welfare reform [of 1996].”
It's amazing how many more people buy health insurance when the government assesses penalties. It's almost as if you're forcing them to buy a product they would rather have the freedom to choose otherwise.
EPT
