Where does the government get money? The problem with government is that when it contracts stuff it doesn't need to worry about minimizing the cost. When a business does it instead it does minimize the cost so it's more efficient. I'll give you the roads thing, because this is no time for a dramatic reform of roads being funded privately, and maybe it will never be the time for that, but what about the stimulus itself? Yeah... that's clearly wrong.
The government does pretty much everything through private contractors. It's literally paying private companies to do stuff.
Yeah... and a large reason why women don't get other jobs is the mandatory provided maternal leave, and other labor laws encouraging racism.
Sorry but this made me lol out of confusion. Maternal leave is so racist!
sorry I meant sexist... ?
also, yes government contracts private sector, but it has little incentive to go with the lowest bidder, a lot of time lobbyism is involved, and it get dirty.
like I said I don't want to get into the discussion of roads because now is definitely not the time, but in general the private sector is more responsible with its spending, because businesses that aren't get out-competed. Government has no real competition
Kirarip: All your theories make sense to an agree, but only if you assume that the premise "growing economy and/or growing profits lead to more wealth" is always true. Don't they? You seem to assume that growing profits would not only translate 1:1 into new jobs (or at least at a very good rate), but additionally that those new jobs would over time lead to more wealth overall. Since I'm not too knowledgeable about economics I usually avoid those kinds of discussion, but the last two decades in Germany have proven this premise to be so radically wrong that I will try to participate.
During the 90th our government deregulated the economy (mainly the financial instituts), basically lowered possibly minimum wages (though that's technically wrong: they subsidized the low-wage-sector by carrying a huge part of the salary of the employees, which leads basically to the same result: companies were able to hire people a lot cheaper) and cut spending on welfare. What happened? Corporate profits skyrocketed, there was a very slight increase in overall employment, due lots of jobs being destroyed and created anew - sounds promising, but what happened was that already low-wage workers got fired and rehired by temp work companies to lease them back to their old employers, just for less money.
We are the strongest economy in Europe by far because of those changes. Our overall wealth increased as nation, but neither were new jobs created nor did the average wealth increase - it's actually to the contrary: while the average monetary assets of the richest 1% of our society increased by an amount of 390.000€, the assets of the lowest 70% basically didn't increase at all. [numbers between 2002 and 2007] (if you take inflation into account some parts actually lost money. And don't get me talking about the increase in corporate profits compared to the increase in salaries makes the rich/poor one appear pale)
You seem to take the "lower restriction for business = more profit = more jobs => more overall wealth" formula for granted, but I feel very sceptical regarding those 'truths' since the last 15 years have actually shown exactly the opposite, at least over here.
Watched the debate last night, as a thinking democrat (can't vote yet ) and i can't believe Ron Paul was boo'ed when he said the whole Muslim world doesn't hate/want to kill the US/West. I was in shock.
On another note, the most tolerable for me were paul, and huntsman. Bachmann is a raving lunatic, Cain just spits slogans, and Romney and Perry, not fans.
and who cares about santorum... couldn't stand him or gingritch (know i butchered his name)
I don't see how his response was bad. He is libertarian, and what he said sounded like what a libertarian would say.
When ideological purity is considered more important than saving lives, you know that the society is well and truly fucked. At this rate, there will be little difference between the US and China in a decade or so. Wealth rules! I've got mine, fuck you! Nationalistic jingoism and flag waving and greatest country/people in the world... while you know, lagging behind everyone else but propaganda says otherwise.
this is fucking retarded.
ron paul is so correct. if you don't have health insurance but yet you're making a healthy living, then you should have some kind of personal savings to afford the healthcare out of pocket, or be able to borrow it with interest, or rely on friends/family to help you out, that's all there is to it.
it's not the society's job to hedge risks of personal irresponsibility, this line of thought brings us to a very morally hazzardous place.
also note that if the healthcare system is driven by an actual free market then healthcare wouldn't be so fucking expensive.
I think it's undoubtedly true that in general people should save for rainy days. In my opinion, though, I don't think that the consequence of being ill prepared for something like a tragic accident (honestly, do we remotely think about getting hit by a car every day?) should be that you have to pay or you die. :/
I also don't think it's moral hazard either because no one wants to put themselves in a position to "die". There's a difference between knowing you'll be saved if you go bankrupt (and therefore will take financial risks every so often) and knowing you'll be saved if you're on the verge of the death. The very threat of death is one that deters most people.
Also, we've had private insurance trying to insure people for years in a market that's basically been not very well regulated. Government insurance did very little to tamper with private insurance companies....and yet prices are still high. That to me tells me that some structural reform is necessary other than just "oh free markets are best".
there are still options of how you can receive treatment even if you don't have the money, but if you have the savements, and don't have insurance, then like you said, you either pay or you die... I don't see what's wrong with that when saving people's lives actually costs money.
if you don't have the money there are charities, people willing to loan you money, and friends and family who could possibly help you out.
I agree that Steve Jobs was responsible for his cancer. He shouldn't have led such a risky lifestyle.
Wow are you that dumb? of course it's not his fault he got cancer, but if like in that question that was asked of Ron Paul someone makes a comfortable living and doesn't have health insurance and doesn't have personal savings just in case something happens then it's his fault and he's being irresponsible.
what if he doesn't have his house insured, and a lightning hits it, and it burns down? is the government supposed to give him a new home?
I want to apologize. I misread your post early in the morning. I thought you were making the common conservative argument that people create their own health problems and should be responsible.
What kind of conservatives would say that? The fact of life is that at any point of time shit can happen to anyone, and there are some risks that you may want to invest in protecting yourself against and some that you just choose to live with.
Having personal savings is a personally responsible way of hedging your risks against the possibility of something unfortunate happening to you. If something is kind of likely but would be extremely devastating for you financially you get insurance for that event.
There are still stuff that can happen to people that aren't prepared for them. Hell there's a lot of things that you can't reasonably prepare against, and although a lot of socialists won't admit it, the government won't save you from them either.
However, I disagree with you that charity is in anyway a substitute for government welfare. If your family and friends are also facing difficulties, they're not going to be able to help you out. And if the charities are facing difficulties with their donations (which happens in recessions), then they're not going to be able to pay for your hospital expenses. And there's no reason why a bank would someone give a loan to cover a health procedure. That's a horribly retarded argument. A bank loan isn't automatic.
Ok, well first of all you're underestimating how much charities help people. Note that they use money way more responsibly than the government, and there are charitable people in the country, especially when the efficiency of economy is allowed to increase in the free market, there will obviously still be incredibly poor people, but on average people will have more stuff, and charities on average will also be in better shape.
Second, yes your friends and family can be in tough situations as well, but really the situation was that a man who was living comfortably decided not to get insurance... There's a bunch of stuff he can do to avoid not getting the healthcare he needs. Yes he can't just sit on his ass and wait for the government to rescue him.
Well there isn't a reason that a bank like that can't exist. You need a procedure that costs X. First you prove your income. Then you get some kind of estimate on the chance of success of the procedure... like y%. The bank uses your income to estimate how long it would take you to pay off a loan such that you cover the standard current interest %, with the % chance of risk (you dying/being unable to work after the operation) on top of it + a little extra on top of it for the bank to make a profit... boom it's a loan. I don't know if they do such things now, but if they don't it's probably because of some retarded regulation due to lobbyists from insurance companies... regulations that prevent people from being able to save their own lifes...
I'm going to cite one example of where the the private insurance system completely failed and was cannibalized by a socialized system. The fire fighting services didn't start out as socialized systems. There were previous private fire halls. But there were several issues that made it a disaster. people made short sighted decisions to save money. And even if I was personally responsible for my own house, I couldn't guarantee that my neighbour was responsible for his own house. Fires don't happen to respect property lines. Lastly, even if I did pay for private fire fighting protection, there was no guarantee I would receive it under the private system. The private fire fighting systems would carry someone to verify that the property was insured. Sometimes that would be difficult as the house number was burning. The private systems didn't have the goal of saving lives and they could never operate with that goal in mind.
There's no guarantee you receive it under the government control either, it's very likely that you do, but it better be very likely given how much extra money social projects cost vs private ones... but anyways I don't see a problem with this, because fire/police is a state power which is considerably less inefficient than the federal government, and states often relegate these things to cities, which are smaller and even less inefficient, so while there's still some money being lost unnecessary it's not that bad...
But what about my example? You have a good solid income of like 150K, but little savings and no house insurance... a lightning strikes your house and it burns down... Is the government also supposed to come your rescue to save you?...
Look the answer is obvious, people need to take responsibilities for their mistakes. Then the very poor get helped by charities, and only then if it's still not enough, if the government at this point is small enough that it's not running huge deficits like others is should the government consider providing some safety net if it has some surplus. and of course, it should always start at the district level up. When a president says he's gonna double the benefits for everyone... He's talking politics, and he's simply trying to win people over by promising something for nothing, but maybe when small district governor who actually lives amongst the people he's a representative of promises slight increase in funding for the one soup kitchen in town, you have more reason to assume that he's actually doing it out of the goodness of his heart, because he cares about the community he lives in, and maybe he would even take a slight pay cut himself to help fund this endeavor.
as for private systems don't having the people's interest in mind... No one does... the government doesn't either. People's votes actually mean less to a government than people's money to a private company, your bargaining power is much higher with a company than it is with the government, and with the company if you sign a contract you can take them to court on fraud charges if they infringe, and get your money back +more... So private systems actually have a larger incentive to carry out their promises.
Trying to collapse your post. I know how banks work and how they decide to determine the ability to give out loans, but what you're effectively saying is that working poor people should die because they can't afford cancer surgeries or heart surgeries, because they'll never be able to pay off the principal in expensive health care cases.
What's the point of not having the government offer health insurance if it's basically stupid to not have health insurance? I'm not a farmer. I don't need crop insurance. I drive a car so I need car insurance. I rent so I don't need home insurance, but I have rental insurance. I'm ignoring your example because we're dealing with health insurance. I can choose to own a home in order to live, but I can't choose what ailments are going to affect me. I don't know if I'll suffer from leukemia, multiple sclerosis, or diabetes. You're arguing that going off health insurance is not a responsible decision, so why give people the choice to make a decision can have devastating consequences. There's transaction costs associated with the private health insurance systems as well and it's why all the socialized health care systems perform more efficiently. I actually think there's economies of scale in all insurance systems that makes it so that the government should be the one handling insurance, because insurance doesn't function the same way as goods or services.
And you say that the private systems do better than government, but if that were true, then the private fire fighting system wouldn't have been replaced by the socialized one. I'm using history to counter the myth of the perfect free market. If the free market was always better than government, then it wouldn't ever cause problems for people to deviate away from it. And if the free market was efficient, the electric companies would have implemented electricity in rural areas without government involvement. But they didn't. The government had to step in and subsidize the electric power companies to provide rural electricity. If there's a a rural Republican party versus urban Democratic party divide, then the hypocritical Republicans should forego their electricity if they hate government so much.
On September 14 2011 10:43 KiaL.Kiwi wrote: Kirarip: All your theories make sense to an agree, but only if you assume that the premise "growing economy and/or growing profits lead to more wealth" is always true. Don't they? You seem to assume that growing profits would not only translate 1:1 into new jobs (or at least at a very good rate), but additionally that those new jobs would over time lead to more wealth overall. Since I'm not too knowledgeable about economics I usually avoid those kinds of discussion, but the last two decades in Germany have proven this premise to be so radically wrong that I will try to participate.
I think they're closer to 1:1 when talking about small businesses.
During the 90th our government deregulated the economy (mainly the financial instituts), basically lowered possibly minimum wages (though that's technically wrong: they subsidized the low-wage-sector by carrying a huge part of the salary of the employees, which leads basically to the same result: companies were able to hire people a lot cheaper) and cut spending on welfare. What happened? Corporate profits skyrocketed, there was a very slight increase in overall employment, due lots of jobs being destroyed and created anew - sounds promising, but what happened was that already low-wage workers got fired and rehired by temp work companies to lease them back to their old employers, just for less money.
Well first of all I want to say that I don't support corporate welfare or anything of that sort.
I'm not a big fan of subsidies because they creates loopholes. minimum wage laws can also create loopholes(having less hours clocked in than how long you've actually worked in order to be able to keep a lower paying job legally etc.) although they're not very useful.
We are the strongest economy in Europe by far because of those changes. Our overall wealth increased as nation, but neither were new jobs created nor did the average wealth increase - it's actually to the contrary: while the average monetary assets of the richest 1% of our society increased by an amount of 390.000€, the assets of the lowest 70% basically didn't increase at all. (if you take inflation into account some parts actually lost money. And don't get me talking about the increase in corporate profits compared to the increase in salaries makes the rich/poor one appear pale)
I think lobbyism is largely at fault here. European countries are known to have a strong central government (Hope I'm not lying here, I may be.) When a government has a lot of power it get lobbyists coming in that pretty much bribe politicians to support their interests. at least this is what happens in the US.
If you decrease the power of central government, to not subsidize large corporations then they will be forced to invest more, because they will lose their competitive edge if they sit on large profits unless it's a monopoly.
Unions also have a role to play in helping workers bargain for higher wages.
You seem to take the "lower restriction for business = more profit = more jobs => more overall wealth" formula for granted, but I feel very sceptical regarding those 'truths' since the last 15 years have actually shown exactly the opposite, at least over here.
I agree it's not perfect, but at the level of small businesses it works better, than at the level of large corporations.
and in the end how would you propose that new jobs are created when it's not profitable to hire an employee for the current minimum wage?
I don't agree with a lot of the ideology of Ron Paul, but goddamn it, he's that rare breed of somewhat honest politicians.
To say in a republican debate that 9/11 was caused by the US irreponsible foreing policy takes some MAJOR balls. Those people don't like the truth just their nationalistic and patriotic BS.
the argument over minimum wage is a stupid one because no one can live off of it anyway in the US. No minimum wage jobs have employees that work 40 hrs a week (or even close to it) and these industries don't need more employees or actually produce anything that would make costs drop for everyone else.
Do you think people who work on assembly lines make anything close to minimum wage? No? Well then where the fuck is the cost going to drop? Minimum wage isn't a living wage and probably rightfully so. That being said, removing minimum wage is just going to fuck teenagers/college students and people scraping by on part time jobs.
The fact of the matter is we live in a consumer society and with that its hard to create jobs. You have people in the banking industry that actually don't produce a fucking thing but are valuable simply because of the system we have. Our only way of competing is using automation and being more efficient. Unfortunately that also creates a drain on jobs.
A perfect example of this is the auto industry. The fact of the matter is, in the production environment people cannot perform tasks as well and as efficiently as machines. You need some people sure, for assembly, things that would be expensive to check, etc, but for big suppliers (say an injection molding plant, chroming plant, etc) machines do all the work and you have far fewer employees than you would 20-30 years ago. The only reason we have any jobs is because of higher quality because of technology. I've seen a production chroming facility and have known people who have had issues with suppliers in asia where a guy was literally being paid a few dollars to manually insert his rack into the bath. They make parts cheaper sure but their quality is absolute shit. This problem cannot be solved with more jobs, only with better/cheaper technology and fewer jobs.
I don't see how his response was bad. He is libertarian, and what he said sounded like what a libertarian would say.
When ideological purity is considered more important than saving lives, you know that the society is well and truly fucked. At this rate, there will be little difference between the US and China in a decade or so. Wealth rules! I've got mine, fuck you! Nationalistic jingoism and flag waving and greatest country/people in the world... while you know, lagging behind everyone else but propaganda says otherwise.
this is fucking retarded.
ron paul is so correct. if you don't have health insurance but yet you're making a healthy living, then you should have some kind of personal savings to afford the healthcare out of pocket, or be able to borrow it with interest, or rely on friends/family to help you out, that's all there is to it.
it's not the society's job to hedge risks of personal irresponsibility, this line of thought brings us to a very morally hazzardous place.
also note that if the healthcare system is driven by an actual free market then healthcare wouldn't be so fucking expensive.
I think it's undoubtedly true that in general people should save for rainy days. In my opinion, though, I don't think that the consequence of being ill prepared for something like a tragic accident (honestly, do we remotely think about getting hit by a car every day?) should be that you have to pay or you die. :/
I also don't think it's moral hazard either because no one wants to put themselves in a position to "die". There's a difference between knowing you'll be saved if you go bankrupt (and therefore will take financial risks every so often) and knowing you'll be saved if you're on the verge of the death. The very threat of death is one that deters most people.
Also, we've had private insurance trying to insure people for years in a market that's basically been not very well regulated. Government insurance did very little to tamper with private insurance companies....and yet prices are still high. That to me tells me that some structural reform is necessary other than just "oh free markets are best".
there are still options of how you can receive treatment even if you don't have the money, but if you have the savements, and don't have insurance, then like you said, you either pay or you die... I don't see what's wrong with that when saving people's lives actually costs money.
if you don't have the money there are charities, people willing to loan you money, and friends and family who could possibly help you out.
I agree that Steve Jobs was responsible for his cancer. He shouldn't have led such a risky lifestyle.
Wow are you that dumb? of course it's not his fault he got cancer, but if like in that question that was asked of Ron Paul someone makes a comfortable living and doesn't have health insurance and doesn't have personal savings just in case something happens then it's his fault and he's being irresponsible.
what if he doesn't have his house insured, and a lightning hits it, and it burns down? is the government supposed to give him a new home?
I want to apologize. I misread your post early in the morning. I thought you were making the common conservative argument that people create their own health problems and should be responsible.
What kind of conservatives would say that? The fact of life is that at any point of time shit can happen to anyone, and there are some risks that you may want to invest in protecting yourself against and some that you just choose to live with.
Having personal savings is a personally responsible way of hedging your risks against the possibility of something unfortunate happening to you. If something is kind of likely but would be extremely devastating for you financially you get insurance for that event.
There are still stuff that can happen to people that aren't prepared for them. Hell there's a lot of things that you can't reasonably prepare against, and although a lot of socialists won't admit it, the government won't save you from them either.
However, I disagree with you that charity is in anyway a substitute for government welfare. If your family and friends are also facing difficulties, they're not going to be able to help you out. And if the charities are facing difficulties with their donations (which happens in recessions), then they're not going to be able to pay for your hospital expenses. And there's no reason why a bank would someone give a loan to cover a health procedure. That's a horribly retarded argument. A bank loan isn't automatic.
Ok, well first of all you're underestimating how much charities help people. Note that they use money way more responsibly than the government, and there are charitable people in the country, especially when the efficiency of economy is allowed to increase in the free market, there will obviously still be incredibly poor people, but on average people will have more stuff, and charities on average will also be in better shape.
Second, yes your friends and family can be in tough situations as well, but really the situation was that a man who was living comfortably decided not to get insurance... There's a bunch of stuff he can do to avoid not getting the healthcare he needs. Yes he can't just sit on his ass and wait for the government to rescue him.
Well there isn't a reason that a bank like that can't exist. You need a procedure that costs X. First you prove your income. Then you get some kind of estimate on the chance of success of the procedure... like y%. The bank uses your income to estimate how long it would take you to pay off a loan such that you cover the standard current interest %, with the % chance of risk (you dying/being unable to work after the operation) on top of it + a little extra on top of it for the bank to make a profit... boom it's a loan. I don't know if they do such things now, but if they don't it's probably because of some retarded regulation due to lobbyists from insurance companies... regulations that prevent people from being able to save their own lifes...
So no... it's not a horrible argument.
I'm going to cite one example of where the the private insurance system completely failed and was cannibalized by a socialized system. The fire fighting services didn't start out as socialized systems. There were previous private fire halls. But there were several issues that made it a disaster. people made short sighted decisions to save money. And even if I was personally responsible for my own house, I couldn't guarantee that my neighbour was responsible for his own house. Fires don't happen to respect property lines. Lastly, even if I did pay for private fire fighting protection, there was no guarantee I would receive it under the private system. The private fire fighting systems would carry someone to verify that the property was insured. Sometimes that would be difficult as the house number was burning. The private systems didn't have the goal of saving lives and they could never operate with that goal in mind.
There's no guarantee you receive it under the government control either, it's very likely that you do, but it better be very likely given how much extra money social projects cost vs private ones... but anyways I don't see a problem with this, because fire/police is a state power which is considerably less inefficient than the federal government, and states often relegate these things to cities, which are smaller and even less inefficient, so while there's still some money being lost unnecessary it's not that bad...
But what about my example? You have a good solid income of like 150K, but little savings and no house insurance... a lightning strikes your house and it burns down... Is the government also supposed to come your rescue to save you?...
Look the answer is obvious, people need to take responsibilities for their mistakes. Then the very poor get helped by charities, and only then if it's still not enough, if the government at this point is small enough that it's not running huge deficits like others is should the government consider providing some safety net if it has some surplus. and of course, it should always start at the district level up. When a president says he's gonna double the benefits for everyone... He's talking politics, and he's simply trying to win people over by promising something for nothing, but maybe when small district governor who actually lives amongst the people he's a representative of promises slight increase in funding for the one soup kitchen in town, you have more reason to assume that he's actually doing it out of the goodness of his heart, because he cares about the community he lives in, and maybe he would even take a slight pay cut himself to help fund this endeavor.
as for private systems don't having the people's interest in mind... No one does... the government doesn't either. People's votes actually mean less to a government than people's money to a private company, your bargaining power is much higher with a company than it is with the government, and with the company if you sign a contract you can take them to court on fraud charges if they infringe, and get your money back +more... So private systems actually have a larger incentive to carry out their promises.
Trying to collapse your post. I know how banks work and how they decide to determine the ability to give out loans, but what you're effectively saying is that working poor people should die because they can't afford cancer surgeries or heart surgeries, because they'll never be able to pay off the principal in expensive health care cases.
Like I said there's charities relatives, friends, etc. Let people be generous by choice, forcing them into isn't right, and in the end it's less efficient. your money will be used more efficiently by a charity than the government.
will some people die without treatment? possibly, but let's not pretend the government is capable of taking of everyone... if tons of people started having cancer the government will have saved less people than private insurance.
Plus like I said you can get lower quality care for less money, you could agree to sign a contract with a doctor removing liability from him, which would make the procedure dramatically cheaper... etc. There's tons of stuff a person can try to do to get care in a free market... but if the government for whatever reason neglects one person with socialized healthcare, he is way more likely to die.
What's the point of not having the government offer health insurance if it's basically stupid to not have health insurance?
It's also stupid to not do your homework if you're paying for college... we already had a topic for redistribution of gpa's...
I'm not a farmer. I don't need crop insurance. I drive a car so I need car insurance. I rent so I don't need home insurance, but I have rental insurance. I'm ignoring your example because we're dealing with health insurance. I can choose to own a home in order to live, but I can't choose what ailments are going to affect me. I don't know if I'll suffer from leukemia, multiple sclerosis, or diabetes.
Eh... well you can say that about all property, you can chose to not own anything and simply rent everything even things like toothbrushes, but insurance is probably gonna get rolled into the cost by the guy you're lending it from.
Yeah you can't loan someone else's body, but assuming you own a home which isn't an unreasonable assumption, if you don't get insurance and it gets hit by lightning (also somewhat random like cancer and diseases.) and it burns down, should the government replace your home?
You're arguing that going off health insurance is not a responsible decision, so why give people the choice to make a decision can have devastating consequences. There's transaction costs associated with the private health insurance systems as well and it's why all the socialized health care systems perform more efficiently.
transaction costs are outweighed by government inefficiency. also the point is that you have a choice, if you decide that you want to take a risk with all your money because you need all of it to maximize the chance of success you take responsibility for what could happen if your enterprise doesn't succeed, and if something happens to your health, you can do so if you want because it's your money, and you worked hard for it.
I actually think there's economies of scale in all insurance systems that makes it so that the government should be the one handling insurance, because insurance doesn't function the same way as goods or services.
If a lot of the harmful regulations get uplifted, then insurance can easily be replaced with other things, like personal medical fund account, or just plain old personal savings.
You're missing the point where the way the cost of insurance gets determined is by weighted average cost x weighted average chance of need for treatment + some extra for company expenses + profit.
Right now the healthcare system is fucked up, so everything is way over priced, and etc. but in reality healthcare isn't so absolutely expensive, because if it was, then how could the insurance companies ever afford it for you.
And you say that the private systems do better than government, but if that were true, then the private fire fighting system wouldn't have been replaced by the socialized one. I'm using history to counter the myth of the perfect free market.
Well the government probably has way more resources in the fire fighting system than the private sector did.
If the free market was always better than government, then it wouldn't ever cause problems for people to deviate away from it. And if the free market was efficient, the electric companies would have implemented electricity in rural areas without government involvement. But they didn't. The government had to step in and subsidize the electric power companies to provide rural electricity. If there's a a rural Republican party versus urban Democratic party divide, then the hypocritical Republicans should forego their electricity if they hate government so much.
There are some exceptions obviously... But it's obvious that the free market wasn't purely at work in denying electricity to rural areas, unless they had a price that was unaffordable which would more than likely be due to regulations of large land properties and such.
You hear it every four years: This is the most important election in a generation. So if I say it to you about 2012, you’ll probably tune me out as just another hyperbolic pundit. Which is why I’ll make it more specific: For the future of America’s two political parties, this is the most important election in a generation.
The 2008 election was consequential, of course. It decided which president would respond to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, which led to a lot of comparisons between the 2008 election and 1932. Most famously, Time magazine photoshopped President Obama’s face onto an iconic shot of a grinning Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with the headline: “The New New Deal.” Today, a similar cover might put Obama in a tent city and ask, “The next Hoover?”
We are the strongest economy in Europe by far because of those changes. Our overall wealth increased as nation, but neither were new jobs created nor did the average wealth increase - it's actually to the contrary: while the average monetary assets of the richest 1% of our society increased by an amount of 390.000€, the assets of the lowest 70% basically didn't increase at all. (if you take inflation into account some parts actually lost money. And don't get me talking about the increase in corporate profits compared to the increase in salaries makes the rich/poor one appear pale)
I think lobbyism is largely at fault here. European countries are known to have a strong central government (Hope I'm not lying here, I may be.) When a government has a lot of power it get lobbyists coming in that pretty much bribe politicians to support their interests. at least this is what happens in the US.
If you decrease the power of central government, to not subsidize large corporations then they will be forced to invest more, because they will lose their competitive edge if they sit on large profits unless it's a monopoly.
Unions also have a role to play in helping workers bargain for higher wages.
You seem to take the "lower restriction for business = more profit = more jobs => more overall wealth" formula for granted, but I feel very sceptical regarding those 'truths' since the last 15 years have actually shown exactly the opposite, at least over here.
I agree it's not perfect, but at the level of small businesses it works better, than at the level of large corporations.
and in the end how would you propose that new jobs are created when it's not profitable to hire an employee for the current minimum wage?
We already see what happens when powers are in the individual states' hands. The lobbying shifts to state governments, where local citizens literally CANNOT compete with the national capital of a lobbying group. You have districts/states which already are inline with the goals of large interests, and then you only have to spend those large chunks of money on swing areas. The lobbying and manipulation doesn't stop, it just gets shifted and delocalized as well, where people have fewer protections and there are fewer eyes watching.
As for the minimum wage part, the argument right now is about jobs because wages are already guaranteed. If we were in a market where those wages weren't guaranteed, you bet we'd also see a huge debate about wages. Companies use the information of national unemployment to leverage workers of pay, because being paid $4/hr is better than being unemployed. Even if the employee is worth much more to the company, the fear of unemployment is enough to pay them well under market value. It happens right now with higher skill/wage jobs right now. People are willing to do more work and get paid less, JUST so they don't end up as an unemployment statistic.
On September 14 2011 10:29 Kiarip wrote: How do you figure? China is artificially inflating their currency. If they stop we get massive inflation, but their "deflation" doesn't hurt them, because they have all the goods necessary to spend money on, and tons of people to consume them. Deflation is only bad when it destroys jobs, but it won't necessarily destroy jobs in China, because their own goods can substantially raise their standard of living.
How do I figure that I think people are overestimating the chance of hyperinflation? Because I'm actually referring to hyperinflation a la the Weimar Republic in Germany, and modern Zimbabwe, not the current relatively low inflation that gets people up in arms. If you think China strengthening their currency is enough to cause hyperinflation (what I was arguing) then I suggest you look up hyperinflation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Hyperinflation.html Could at least learn the terms before trying to make your point. Even when there was the oil crisis of the 70's there wasn't hyperinflation by any standard.
On September 14 2011 10:29 Kiarip wrote: The problem is that when people are already in debt you want them to save money and repay their debts and not spend more.
I don't disagree with this statement, but I think you are oversimplifying the situation
On September 14 2011 10:29 Kiarip wrote: Let's not pretend that the stimulus causes any real investing, it simply increases consumption, which let's people selling stuff that's produced outside the US keep their jobs.
"let's not pretend" lol.... When you were referring to "easy money" in your previous post, you were referring to monetary stimulus, which DOES increase investment (all things being equal, I'm more inclined to take out a loan to buy a house or invest in a factory when interest rates are 2% instead of 5%). Fiscal stimulus I am inclined to agree with you and that it just increases consumption directly, but its not clear from your writing that you know know the distinction.
On September 14 2011 06:55 Kiarip wrote: Well the arbitrage is obviously speculating in commodities and precious, and non-precious metals, all the things that retain their value, because the inflation is absolutely 100% predictable with the government policy that forces interest rates low even when the country is in debt, and money by all sound economic reasoning should be hard to come by.
You are doubling down on on your incorrect notion of what arbitrage is. First, It's NOT GUARANTEED profit because you don't know that oil/precious metals isn't already taking into account the inflation factory you described and could just be in a pure bubble and could just crash tomorrow. Second, it's NOT RISKLESS. Its not like gold is going up every single day. It fluctuates. You could get margin called. People who were investing in gold were also investing in the Swiss Franc because the Swiss keep relatively balanced budgets and are thus unlikely to depreciate their currency, yet the Franc a 25 standard deviation move because the Swiss National Bank intervened. People were selling Japanese Yen and buying Australian dollars to take advantage of the differential in the super low Japanese interest rates and the high Australian ones and that spread got annihilated during the financial crisis. Yes if you got in early you probably made a lot of money if you got out in time. If you got in late and didn't get out in time you're broke.It's not guaranteed not riskless by any means, the types of "obvious" plays with the "obvious" arguments you have.
Here is an example of arbitrage: You know someone that will sell you AAPL stock at 100 dollars, and at the exact same time you already know someone else you can sell it too for 110 dollars. Here is another: You melt pennies and sell the raw copper for more than a penny (although this is illegal and am not endorsing anyone to do such a thing).
It's one thing to disagree with me on some analytic or moral grounds, I'm calling you out here on this for bs.
On September 14 2011 06:55 Kiarip wrote: Yeah.. there's no short term solution at all, but the long term solution is that you need to cut the inflation and go through a recession, once individuals can once again build up capital they will be able to invest in industry.
Yes, recession sounds scary at this point in time, but I think it's obvious that the longer the stimulus goes on the scarier the recession will be, and since the stimulus itself isn't actually improving the economy, but simply avoiding the recession through decrease of the average person's purchasing power, we're probably heading in the wrong direction.
First, recent inflation is actually low relative to the time periods before: http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-inflation-rates/ Second, corporations are sitting on record levels of cash/capital and yet they are not investing in infrastructure or doling out record dividends to shareholders.
Despite everything, this thread is actually better than most TL live reports/ balance discussions.
On September 14 2011 10:48 darthfoley wrote: Watched the debate last night, as a thinking democrat (can't vote yet ) and i can't believe Ron Paul was boo'ed when he said the whole Muslim world doesn't hate/want to kill the US/West. I was in shock.
On another note, the most tolerable for me were paul, and huntsman. Bachmann is a raving lunatic, Cain just spits slogans, and Romney and Perry, not fans.
and who cares about santorum... couldn't stand him or gingritch (know i butchered his name)
I didn't know this and goes to show you that half the republicans are crazy/extremists and the other half would rather keep their votes and have them be ignorant than lose their votes and tell them they are being wrong.
On September 14 2011 10:58 CrimsonLotus wrote: I don't agree with a lot of the ideology of Ron Paul, but goddamn it, he's that rare breed of somewhat honest politicians.
To say in a republican debate that 9/11 was caused by the US irreponsible foreing policy takes some MAJOR balls. Those people don't like the truth just their nationalistic and patriotic BS.
Second. I don't understand why the republican elite give this guy so little credit.
I don't see how his response was bad. He is libertarian, and what he said sounded like what a libertarian would say.
When ideological purity is considered more important than saving lives, you know that the society is well and truly fucked. At this rate, there will be little difference between the US and China in a decade or so. Wealth rules! I've got mine, fuck you! Nationalistic jingoism and flag waving and greatest country/people in the world... while you know, lagging behind everyone else but propaganda says otherwise.
this is fucking retarded.
ron paul is so correct. if you don't have health insurance but yet you're making a healthy living, then you should have some kind of personal savings to afford the healthcare out of pocket, or be able to borrow it with interest, or rely on friends/family to help you out, that's all there is to it.
it's not the society's job to hedge risks of personal irresponsibility, this line of thought brings us to a very morally hazzardous place.
also note that if the healthcare system is driven by an actual free market then healthcare wouldn't be so fucking expensive.
I think it's undoubtedly true that in general people should save for rainy days. In my opinion, though, I don't think that the consequence of being ill prepared for something like a tragic accident (honestly, do we remotely think about getting hit by a car every day?) should be that you have to pay or you die. :/
I also don't think it's moral hazard either because no one wants to put themselves in a position to "die". There's a difference between knowing you'll be saved if you go bankrupt (and therefore will take financial risks every so often) and knowing you'll be saved if you're on the verge of the death. The very threat of death is one that deters most people.
Also, we've had private insurance trying to insure people for years in a market that's basically been not very well regulated. Government insurance did very little to tamper with private insurance companies....and yet prices are still high. That to me tells me that some structural reform is necessary other than just "oh free markets are best".
there are still options of how you can receive treatment even if you don't have the money, but if you have the savements, and don't have insurance, then like you said, you either pay or you die... I don't see what's wrong with that when saving people's lives actually costs money.
if you don't have the money there are charities, people willing to loan you money, and friends and family who could possibly help you out.
I agree that Steve Jobs was responsible for his cancer. He shouldn't have led such a risky lifestyle.
Wow are you that dumb? of course it's not his fault he got cancer, but if like in that question that was asked of Ron Paul someone makes a comfortable living and doesn't have health insurance and doesn't have personal savings just in case something happens then it's his fault and he's being irresponsible.
what if he doesn't have his house insured, and a lightning hits it, and it burns down? is the government supposed to give him a new home?
I want to apologize. I misread your post early in the morning. I thought you were making the common conservative argument that people create their own health problems and should be responsible.
What kind of conservatives would say that? The fact of life is that at any point of time shit can happen to anyone, and there are some risks that you may want to invest in protecting yourself against and some that you just choose to live with.
Having personal savings is a personally responsible way of hedging your risks against the possibility of something unfortunate happening to you. If something is kind of likely but would be extremely devastating for you financially you get insurance for that event.
There are still stuff that can happen to people that aren't prepared for them. Hell there's a lot of things that you can't reasonably prepare against, and although a lot of socialists won't admit it, the government won't save you from them either.
However, I disagree with you that charity is in anyway a substitute for government welfare. If your family and friends are also facing difficulties, they're not going to be able to help you out. And if the charities are facing difficulties with their donations (which happens in recessions), then they're not going to be able to pay for your hospital expenses. And there's no reason why a bank would someone give a loan to cover a health procedure. That's a horribly retarded argument. A bank loan isn't automatic.
Ok, well first of all you're underestimating how much charities help people. Note that they use money way more responsibly than the government, and there are charitable people in the country, especially when the efficiency of economy is allowed to increase in the free market, there will obviously still be incredibly poor people, but on average people will have more stuff, and charities on average will also be in better shape.
Second, yes your friends and family can be in tough situations as well, but really the situation was that a man who was living comfortably decided not to get insurance... There's a bunch of stuff he can do to avoid not getting the healthcare he needs. Yes he can't just sit on his ass and wait for the government to rescue him.
Well there isn't a reason that a bank like that can't exist. You need a procedure that costs X. First you prove your income. Then you get some kind of estimate on the chance of success of the procedure... like y%. The bank uses your income to estimate how long it would take you to pay off a loan such that you cover the standard current interest %, with the % chance of risk (you dying/being unable to work after the operation) on top of it + a little extra on top of it for the bank to make a profit... boom it's a loan. I don't know if they do such things now, but if they don't it's probably because of some retarded regulation due to lobbyists from insurance companies... regulations that prevent people from being able to save their own lifes...
So no... it's not a horrible argument.
I'm going to cite one example of where the the private insurance system completely failed and was cannibalized by a socialized system. The fire fighting services didn't start out as socialized systems. There were previous private fire halls. But there were several issues that made it a disaster. people made short sighted decisions to save money. And even if I was personally responsible for my own house, I couldn't guarantee that my neighbour was responsible for his own house. Fires don't happen to respect property lines. Lastly, even if I did pay for private fire fighting protection, there was no guarantee I would receive it under the private system. The private fire fighting systems would carry someone to verify that the property was insured. Sometimes that would be difficult as the house number was burning. The private systems didn't have the goal of saving lives and they could never operate with that goal in mind.
There's no guarantee you receive it under the government control either, it's very likely that you do, but it better be very likely given how much extra money social projects cost vs private ones... but anyways I don't see a problem with this, because fire/police is a state power which is considerably less inefficient than the federal government, and states often relegate these things to cities, which are smaller and even less inefficient, so while there's still some money being lost unnecessary it's not that bad...
But what about my example? You have a good solid income of like 150K, but little savings and no house insurance... a lightning strikes your house and it burns down... Is the government also supposed to come your rescue to save you?...
Look the answer is obvious, people need to take responsibilities for their mistakes. Then the very poor get helped by charities, and only then if it's still not enough, if the government at this point is small enough that it's not running huge deficits like others is should the government consider providing some safety net if it has some surplus. and of course, it should always start at the district level up. When a president says he's gonna double the benefits for everyone... He's talking politics, and he's simply trying to win people over by promising something for nothing, but maybe when small district governor who actually lives amongst the people he's a representative of promises slight increase in funding for the one soup kitchen in town, you have more reason to assume that he's actually doing it out of the goodness of his heart, because he cares about the community he lives in, and maybe he would even take a slight pay cut himself to help fund this endeavor.
as for private systems don't having the people's interest in mind... No one does... the government doesn't either. People's votes actually mean less to a government than people's money to a private company, your bargaining power is much higher with a company than it is with the government, and with the company if you sign a contract you can take them to court on fraud charges if they infringe, and get your money back +more... So private systems actually have a larger incentive to carry out their promises.
Trying to collapse your post. I know how banks work and how they decide to determine the ability to give out loans, but what you're effectively saying is that working poor people should die because they can't afford cancer surgeries or heart surgeries, because they'll never be able to pay off the principal in expensive health care cases.
Like I said there's charities relatives, friends, etc. Let people be generous by choice, forcing them into isn't right, and in the end it's less efficient. your money will be used more efficiently by a charity than the government.
will some people die without treatment? possibly, but let's not pretend the government is capable of taking of everyone... if tons of people started having cancer the government will have saved less people than private insurance.
Plus like I said you can get lower quality care for less money, you could agree to sign a contract with a doctor removing liability from him, which would make the procedure dramatically cheaper... etc. There's tons of stuff a person can try to do to get care in a free market... but if the government for whatever reason neglects one person with socialized healthcare, he is way more likely to die.
I'm not a farmer. I don't need crop insurance. I drive a car so I need car insurance. I rent so I don't need home insurance, but I have rental insurance. I'm ignoring your example because we're dealing with health insurance. I can choose to own a home in order to live, but I can't choose what ailments are going to affect me. I don't know if I'll suffer from leukemia, multiple sclerosis, or diabetes.
Eh... well you can say that about all property, you can chose to not own anything and simply rent everything even things like toothbrushes, but insurance is probably gonna get rolled into the cost by the guy you're lending it from.
Yeah you can't loan someone else's body, but assuming you own a home which isn't an unreasonable assumption, if you don't get insurance and it gets hit by lightning (also somewhat random like cancer and diseases.) and it burns down, should the government replace your home?
You're arguing that going off health insurance is not a responsible decision, so why give people the choice to make a decision can have devastating consequences. There's transaction costs associated with the private health insurance systems as well and it's why all the socialized health care systems perform more efficiently.
transaction costs are outweighed by government inefficiency. also the point is that you have a choice, if you decide that you want to take a risk with all your money because you need all of it to maximize the chance of success you take responsibility for what could happen if your enterprise doesn't succeed, and if something happens to your health, you can do so if you want because it's your money, and you worked hard for it.
I actually think there's economies of scale in all insurance systems that makes it so that the government should be the one handling insurance, because insurance doesn't function the same way as goods or services.
If a lot of the harmful regulations get uplifted, then insurance can easily be replaced with other things, like personal medical fund account, or just plain old personal savings.
You're missing the point where the way the cost of insurance gets determined is by weighted average cost x weighted average chance of need for treatment + some extra for company expenses + profit.
Right now the healthcare system is fucked up, so everything is way over priced, and etc. but in reality healthcare isn't so absolutely expensive, because if it was, then how could the insurance companies ever afford it for you.
And you say that the private systems do better than government, but if that were true, then the private fire fighting system wouldn't have been replaced by the socialized one. I'm using history to counter the myth of the perfect free market.
Well the government probably has way more resources in the fire fighting system than the private sector did.
If the free market was always better than government, then it wouldn't ever cause problems for people to deviate away from it. And if the free market was efficient, the electric companies would have implemented electricity in rural areas without government involvement. But they didn't. The government had to step in and subsidize the electric power companies to provide rural electricity. If there's a a rural Republican party versus urban Democratic party divide, then the hypocritical Republicans should forego their electricity if they hate government so much.
There are some exceptions obviously... But it's obvious that the free market wasn't purely at work in denying electricity to rural areas, unless they had a price that was unaffordable which would more than likely be due to regulations of large land properties and such.
The socialized health care systems are still more efficient. You want to say transactional costs are outweighed by government bureaucracy, but that's not the case. All of the other first world health care systems are saving their citizens money. The socialized systems are more efficient and the free market health care system of the United States is the one that's a terrible system of inefficiency. Canada has the worst efficiency out of the socialized health care systems, but it's doing better than the States. If the free market was better at everything, then it should also be better at providing health care. But it isn't. It's a contradiction in your argument.
On September 14 2011 11:38 cskalias.pbe wrote: First, recent inflation is actually low relative to the time periods before: http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-inflation-rates/ Second, corporations are sitting on record levels of cash/capital and yet they are not investing in infrastructure or doling out record dividends to shareholders.
Despite everything, this thread is actually better than most TL live reports/ balance discussions.
My only fear is that a release of those "record levels of cash/capital" could cause inflation. A large amount of money is being injected into the system, yet it doesn't seem to be making it into our inflation indicators. It requires the Fed to make an extremely quick reaction if that should occur, and I'm not sure it will have the confidence to do so.
On September 14 2011 10:54 Kiarip wrote: I think they're closer to 1:1 when talking about small businesses.
Though that's definetly true at it's core I feel that we are talking about really a rather small part of the overall economy when imaganing companies/employers who would invest every extra $ directly into more employees (even in small business there's tons of improvements to productivity that aren't made just by hiring) - though I could be completly off in this regard, and the figures that I'm finding don't give enough info to judge on it.
I think lobbyism is largely at fault here. European countries are known to have a strong central government (Hope I'm not lying here, I may be.) When a government has a lot of power it get lobbyists coming in that pretty much bribe politicians to support their interests. at least this is what happens in the US. If you decrease the power of central government, to not subsidize large corporations then they will be forced to invest more, because they will lose their competitive edge if they sit on large profits unless it's a monopoly.
I'd definetly agree with the notion itself, though I'd wonder if we shared the same conclusions from it. Strong lobbyism in Germany has made true what the republican party is standing for - cuts in welfare, lower wages, cuts in taxes for companies/rich - which have lead to the results I already told about. Sadly four of our five important partys represent practically the same, neo-liberalist view on economy, and neither of them is going to admit their mistakes or yet changing their course. Though that's not suprising - there isn't much money in lobbying for the socially weak groups in our society There's a lot of unnecessary subsidized economy because of lobbyism as well, I grant you that. But big companies like the suppliers of electric energy have shown again and again that every substitution the government wants to chancel will just be given to the customer. [though I'm not quite sure if they are the best example, the biggest 3 here act pretty much like a cartel...] I feel it's very difficult to decide what should be subsidized and what not - but lobbying has definetly too much influence, yep.
Unions also have a role to play in helping workers bargain for higher wages.
That sound's good, but especially in the low-pay-sector employees are extremly replaceable (since everyone can be cashier and government forces the unemploayed to work or eliminates most of your welfare) and companies use this fact against them. Discounters like Lidl (~150.000 employees) have closed down complete branches when their employees tried to create even as much as an a work council. Without regulations from outside they'd have no inventives left at all to treat them with any fairness (besides public opinion, but public opinion is superficial and forgetful).
and in the end how would you propose that new jobs are created when it's not profitable to hire an employee for the current minimum wage?
Edit: spoilered since I kind of evade the question + Show Spoiler +
As I said, I'm not too deep into Economics, but I see an considerable imbalance between the rich and the everyone else in Germany that has widened itself drastically in the last 20 years - simply because of politics that were catering to already prosperous parts of our society (the gap is factual data and cant be denyied, though one may argue about the reasons for it). I think the question is how to shuffle some of that wealth of the few top percent back into the hands of the remaining society (remember, 4% own as much as the remaining 96% together), the mid and working-class and thereby back into circulation. And that doesn't necessarily mean economic growth or more (low-payed) jobs - there's no causal connection between those two and increasing wealth. Wealth just doesn't "trickle down" in sufficient amounts. How are we able to do this in a fair way that benefits us all is the real question (I don't promote just taking from rich/companies and transfered directly to the rest, but there are so many possiblities to shift the money in ways that would profit all citiens and still disburden low/midclas more while still increasing productivity/demand). I'm always looking at the nordic countries in this regard, with their high taxes, but superior welfare, education and better financial comparability between their citiciens.
I've got the fealing that I answered much too detailed for my simple main objection. "More jobs => more wealth for all" is too easy on an equation to be true. Oh well you gave into it anyway, just a tad bit too little for my taste I actually think we could write a similar conversation on the other too easy truth: "private > public because they have to be efficient or would go bankrupt". The post got pretty far from discussing the candidates themselves - hopefully it's still worth a read in regards to their economical points of view from a country that has experienced lots of the fiscal policy that is proposed in similar forms in your debates.
ok last post for me today... i've been posting the entire day with my 'a' key in my clipboard caz that key is broken, and it's getting really annoying.
We are the strongest economy in Europe by far because of those changes. Our overall wealth increased as nation, but neither were new jobs created nor did the average wealth increase - it's actually to the contrary: while the average monetary assets of the richest 1% of our society increased by an amount of 390.000€, the assets of the lowest 70% basically didn't increase at all. (if you take inflation into account some parts actually lost money. And don't get me talking about the increase in corporate profits compared to the increase in salaries makes the rich/poor one appear pale)
I think lobbyism is largely at fault here. European countries are known to have a strong central government (Hope I'm not lying here, I may be.) When a government has a lot of power it get lobbyists coming in that pretty much bribe politicians to support their interests. at least this is what happens in the US.
If you decrease the power of central government, to not subsidize large corporations then they will be forced to invest more, because they will lose their competitive edge if they sit on large profits unless it's a monopoly.
Unions also have a role to play in helping workers bargain for higher wages.
You seem to take the "lower restriction for business = more profit = more jobs => more overall wealth" formula for granted, but I feel very sceptical regarding those 'truths' since the last 15 years have actually shown exactly the opposite, at least over here.
I agree it's not perfect, but at the level of small businesses it works better, than at the level of large corporations.
and in the end how would you propose that new jobs are created when it's not profitable to hire an employee for the current minimum wage?
We already see what happens when powers are in the individual states' hands. The lobbying shifts to state governments, where local citizens literally CANNOT compete with the national capital of a lobbying group. You have districts/states which already are inline with the goals of large interests, and then you only have to spend those large chunks of money on swing areas. The lobbying and manipulation doesn't stop, it just gets shifted and delocalized as well, where people have fewer protections and there are fewer eyes watching.
As for the minimum wage part, the argument right now is about jobs because wages are already guaranteed. If we were in a market where those wages weren't guaranteed, you bet we'd also see a huge debate about wages. Companies use the information of national unemployment to leverage workers of pay, because being paid $4/hr is better than being unemployed. Even if the employee is worth much more to the company, the fear of unemployment is enough to pay them well under market value. It happens right now with higher skill/wage jobs right now. People are willing to do more work and get paid less, JUST so they don't end up as an unemployment statistic.
I agree with the first paragraph more so than the second, I don't know what should be done about lobbying groups and their relationships with state legislatures... I'm not convinced that State lobbying is harder to stop, my common sense would tell me that it should be easier but like I said I don't know.
as for wages... yes of course there's going to be some problems with taking advantage of workers, but it gives small businesses incentive to higher more people. Once again I don't know if there's a solution that will immediately please everyone, but I feel like if no one is willing to hire, then there will be no jobs at all so there needs to be incentives made to hire more, by protecting workers less so that they are hire-able.
On September 14 2011 10:29 Kiarip wrote: How do you figure? China is artificially inflating their currency. If they stop we get massive inflation, but their "deflation" doesn't hurt them, because they have all the goods necessary to spend money on, and tons of people to consume them. Deflation is only bad when it destroys jobs, but it won't necessarily destroy jobs in China, because their own goods can substantially raise their standard of living.
How do I figure that I think people are overestimating the chance of hyperinflation? Because I'm actually referring to hyperinflation a la the Weimar Republic in Germany, and modern Zimbabwe, not the current relatively low inflation that gets people up in arms. If you think China strengthening their currency is enough to cause hyperinflation (what I was arguing) then I suggest you look up hyperinflation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Hyperinflation.html Could at least learn the terms before trying to make your point. Even when there was the oil crisis of the 70's there wasn't hyperinflation by any standard.
well how high does it have to get for the situation to be really bad? I'm sure it doesn't need to be as high as germany or hungary. Fine I guess I'm not talking about hyperinflation although I think even that has some chance of occurring, but dangerously high inflation.
On September 14 2011 10:29 Kiarip wrote: The problem is that when people are already in debt you want them to save money and repay their debts and not spend more.
I don't disagree with this statement, but I think you are oversimplifying the situation
I agree that there are other factors, and the low interest rates are probably not there for the purpose of enticing people to get further into debt, but i'm simply saying it is one of the effects that they're having, I would certainly like to hear an argument for their merits.
If their purpose is to increase inflation I would like to hear about the merits of this also given the current situation.
On September 14 2011 10:29 Kiarip wrote: Let's not pretend that the stimulus causes any real investing, it simply increases consumption, which let's people selling stuff that's produced outside the US keep their jobs.
"let's not pretend" lol.... When you were referring to "easy money" in your previous post, you were referring to monetary stimulus, which DOES increase investment (all things being equal, I'm more inclined to take out a loan to buy a house or invest in a factory when interest rates are 2% instead of 5%). Fiscal stimulus I am inclined to agree with you and that it just increases consumption directly, but its not clear from your writing that you know know the distinction.
I am talking about the monetary stimulus. Low interest rates make loans more likely, but starting factories obviously doesn't seem profitable to investors right now, possibly because of the over-regulation?
there's other stuff involved here obviously, but the money for the stimulus at some point comes out of the private sector. It seems like the government wants immediate growth, but a contraction is looking inevitable because of all the debt.
I would argue that attempts to stimulate the economy with money would make the contraction worse, and based on that I think that it's not a good idea.
On September 14 2011 06:55 Kiarip wrote: Well the arbitrage is obviously speculating in commodities and precious, and non-precious metals, all the things that retain their value, because the inflation is absolutely 100% predictable with the government policy that forces interest rates low even when the country is in debt, and money by all sound economic reasoning should be hard to come by.
You are doubling down on on your incorrect notion of what arbitrage is. First, It's NOT GUARANTEED profit because you don't know that oil/precious metals isn't already taking into account the inflation factory you described and could just be in a pure bubble and could just crash tomorrow. Second, it's NOT RISKLESS. Its not like gold is going up every single day. It fluctuates. You could get margin called. People who were investing in gold were also investing in the Swiss Franc because the Swiss keep relatively balanced budgets and are thus unlikely to depreciate their currency, yet the Franc a 25 standard deviation move because the Swiss National Bank intervened. People were selling Japanese Yen and buying Australian dollars to take advantage of the differential in the super low Japanese interest rates and the high Australian ones and that spread got annihilated during the financial crisis. Yes if you got in early you probably made a lot of money if you got out in time. If you got in late and didn't get out in time you're broke.It's not guaranteed not riskless by any means, the types of "obvious" plays with the "obvious" arguments you have.
Here is an example of arbitrage: You know someone that will sell you AAPL stock at 100 dollars, and at the exact same time you already know someone else you can sell it too for 110 dollars. Here is another: You melt pennies and sell the raw copper for more than a penny (although this is illegal and am not endorsing anyone to do such a thing).
It's one thing to disagree with me on some analytic or moral grounds, I'm calling you out here on this for bs.
Yeah, it was a hyperbole, I'm actually not quite sure what I was trying to originally say. I didn't really think it through, it just seems that low interest rates in a situation where they would naturally be high should create some kind of similar situation to an arbitrage, I didn't really think it through so I went with commodities as an inflation hedge, but it's definitely a hyperbole or just bullshit like you said, and you're right.
On September 14 2011 06:55 Kiarip wrote: Yeah.. there's no short term solution at all, but the long term solution is that you need to cut the inflation and go through a recession, once individuals can once again build up capital they will be able to invest in industry.
Yes, recession sounds scary at this point in time, but I think it's obvious that the longer the stimulus goes on the scarier the recession will be, and since the stimulus itself isn't actually improving the economy, but simply avoiding the recession through decrease of the average person's purchasing power, we're probably heading in the wrong direction.
First, recent inflation is actually low relative to the time periods before: http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-inflation-rates/ Second, corporations are sitting on record levels of cash/capital and yet they are not investing in infrastructure or doling out record dividends to shareholders.
Despite everything, this thread is actually better than most TL live reports/ balance discussions.
well inflation is measured in a weird way nowadays, I dunno how trustworthy numbers really are, but still even so... I think that stimulus doesn't need to cause inflation in order to make the recession worse, because the interest is applied, while the private sector is losing money on average in redistribution. Not sure if that's sensible.
On September 14 2011 11:40 jace32 wrote: Kiarip, I'm curious --- are you employed, and if so do you have any experience in business management, dealing with unions, or hourly payroll?
no, no, no, and no. But I never said i'm speaking from experience, I'm simply fishing for explanations I can find plausible things that I personally don't find sensible.
On September 13 2011 12:02 Sufficiency wrote: [quote]
I don't see how his response was bad. He is libertarian, and what he said sounded like what a libertarian would say.
When ideological purity is considered more important than saving lives, you know that the society is well and truly fucked. At this rate, there will be little difference between the US and China in a decade or so. Wealth rules! I've got mine, fuck you! Nationalistic jingoism and flag waving and greatest country/people in the world... while you know, lagging behind everyone else but propaganda says otherwise.
this is fucking retarded.
ron paul is so correct. if you don't have health insurance but yet you're making a healthy living, then you should have some kind of personal savings to afford the healthcare out of pocket, or be able to borrow it with interest, or rely on friends/family to help you out, that's all there is to it.
it's not the society's job to hedge risks of personal irresponsibility, this line of thought brings us to a very morally hazzardous place.
also note that if the healthcare system is driven by an actual free market then healthcare wouldn't be so fucking expensive.
I think it's undoubtedly true that in general people should save for rainy days. In my opinion, though, I don't think that the consequence of being ill prepared for something like a tragic accident (honestly, do we remotely think about getting hit by a car every day?) should be that you have to pay or you die. :/
I also don't think it's moral hazard either because no one wants to put themselves in a position to "die". There's a difference between knowing you'll be saved if you go bankrupt (and therefore will take financial risks every so often) and knowing you'll be saved if you're on the verge of the death. The very threat of death is one that deters most people.
Also, we've had private insurance trying to insure people for years in a market that's basically been not very well regulated. Government insurance did very little to tamper with private insurance companies....and yet prices are still high. That to me tells me that some structural reform is necessary other than just "oh free markets are best".
there are still options of how you can receive treatment even if you don't have the money, but if you have the savements, and don't have insurance, then like you said, you either pay or you die... I don't see what's wrong with that when saving people's lives actually costs money.
if you don't have the money there are charities, people willing to loan you money, and friends and family who could possibly help you out.
I agree that Steve Jobs was responsible for his cancer. He shouldn't have led such a risky lifestyle.
Wow are you that dumb? of course it's not his fault he got cancer, but if like in that question that was asked of Ron Paul someone makes a comfortable living and doesn't have health insurance and doesn't have personal savings just in case something happens then it's his fault and he's being irresponsible.
what if he doesn't have his house insured, and a lightning hits it, and it burns down? is the government supposed to give him a new home?
I want to apologize. I misread your post early in the morning. I thought you were making the common conservative argument that people create their own health problems and should be responsible.
What kind of conservatives would say that? The fact of life is that at any point of time shit can happen to anyone, and there are some risks that you may want to invest in protecting yourself against and some that you just choose to live with.
Having personal savings is a personally responsible way of hedging your risks against the possibility of something unfortunate happening to you. If something is kind of likely but would be extremely devastating for you financially you get insurance for that event.
There are still stuff that can happen to people that aren't prepared for them. Hell there's a lot of things that you can't reasonably prepare against, and although a lot of socialists won't admit it, the government won't save you from them either.
However, I disagree with you that charity is in anyway a substitute for government welfare. If your family and friends are also facing difficulties, they're not going to be able to help you out. And if the charities are facing difficulties with their donations (which happens in recessions), then they're not going to be able to pay for your hospital expenses. And there's no reason why a bank would someone give a loan to cover a health procedure. That's a horribly retarded argument. A bank loan isn't automatic.
Ok, well first of all you're underestimating how much charities help people. Note that they use money way more responsibly than the government, and there are charitable people in the country, especially when the efficiency of economy is allowed to increase in the free market, there will obviously still be incredibly poor people, but on average people will have more stuff, and charities on average will also be in better shape.
Second, yes your friends and family can be in tough situations as well, but really the situation was that a man who was living comfortably decided not to get insurance... There's a bunch of stuff he can do to avoid not getting the healthcare he needs. Yes he can't just sit on his ass and wait for the government to rescue him.
Well there isn't a reason that a bank like that can't exist. You need a procedure that costs X. First you prove your income. Then you get some kind of estimate on the chance of success of the procedure... like y%. The bank uses your income to estimate how long it would take you to pay off a loan such that you cover the standard current interest %, with the % chance of risk (you dying/being unable to work after the operation) on top of it + a little extra on top of it for the bank to make a profit... boom it's a loan. I don't know if they do such things now, but if they don't it's probably because of some retarded regulation due to lobbyists from insurance companies... regulations that prevent people from being able to save their own lifes...
So no... it's not a horrible argument.
I'm going to cite one example of where the the private insurance system completely failed and was cannibalized by a socialized system. The fire fighting services didn't start out as socialized systems. There were previous private fire halls. But there were several issues that made it a disaster. people made short sighted decisions to save money. And even if I was personally responsible for my own house, I couldn't guarantee that my neighbour was responsible for his own house. Fires don't happen to respect property lines. Lastly, even if I did pay for private fire fighting protection, there was no guarantee I would receive it under the private system. The private fire fighting systems would carry someone to verify that the property was insured. Sometimes that would be difficult as the house number was burning. The private systems didn't have the goal of saving lives and they could never operate with that goal in mind.
There's no guarantee you receive it under the government control either, it's very likely that you do, but it better be very likely given how much extra money social projects cost vs private ones... but anyways I don't see a problem with this, because fire/police is a state power which is considerably less inefficient than the federal government, and states often relegate these things to cities, which are smaller and even less inefficient, so while there's still some money being lost unnecessary it's not that bad...
But what about my example? You have a good solid income of like 150K, but little savings and no house insurance... a lightning strikes your house and it burns down... Is the government also supposed to come your rescue to save you?...
Look the answer is obvious, people need to take responsibilities for their mistakes. Then the very poor get helped by charities, and only then if it's still not enough, if the government at this point is small enough that it's not running huge deficits like others is should the government consider providing some safety net if it has some surplus. and of course, it should always start at the district level up. When a president says he's gonna double the benefits for everyone... He's talking politics, and he's simply trying to win people over by promising something for nothing, but maybe when small district governor who actually lives amongst the people he's a representative of promises slight increase in funding for the one soup kitchen in town, you have more reason to assume that he's actually doing it out of the goodness of his heart, because he cares about the community he lives in, and maybe he would even take a slight pay cut himself to help fund this endeavor.
as for private systems don't having the people's interest in mind... No one does... the government doesn't either. People's votes actually mean less to a government than people's money to a private company, your bargaining power is much higher with a company than it is with the government, and with the company if you sign a contract you can take them to court on fraud charges if they infringe, and get your money back +more... So private systems actually have a larger incentive to carry out their promises.
Trying to collapse your post. I know how banks work and how they decide to determine the ability to give out loans, but what you're effectively saying is that working poor people should die because they can't afford cancer surgeries or heart surgeries, because they'll never be able to pay off the principal in expensive health care cases.
Like I said there's charities relatives, friends, etc. Let people be generous by choice, forcing them into isn't right, and in the end it's less efficient. your money will be used more efficiently by a charity than the government.
will some people die without treatment? possibly, but let's not pretend the government is capable of taking of everyone... if tons of people started having cancer the government will have saved less people than private insurance.
Plus like I said you can get lower quality care for less money, you could agree to sign a contract with a doctor removing liability from him, which would make the procedure dramatically cheaper... etc. There's tons of stuff a person can try to do to get care in a free market... but if the government for whatever reason neglects one person with socialized healthcare, he is way more likely to die.
What's the point of not having the government offer health insurance if it's basically stupid to not have health insurance?
It's also stupid to not do your homework if you're paying for college... we already had a topic for redistribution of gpa's...
I'm not a farmer. I don't need crop insurance. I drive a car so I need car insurance. I rent so I don't need home insurance, but I have rental insurance. I'm ignoring your example because we're dealing with health insurance. I can choose to own a home in order to live, but I can't choose what ailments are going to affect me. I don't know if I'll suffer from leukemia, multiple sclerosis, or diabetes.
Eh... well you can say that about all property, you can chose to not own anything and simply rent everything even things like toothbrushes, but insurance is probably gonna get rolled into the cost by the guy you're lending it from.
Yeah you can't loan someone else's body, but assuming you own a home which isn't an unreasonable assumption, if you don't get insurance and it gets hit by lightning (also somewhat random like cancer and diseases.) and it burns down, should the government replace your home?
You're arguing that going off health insurance is not a responsible decision, so why give people the choice to make a decision can have devastating consequences. There's transaction costs associated with the private health insurance systems as well and it's why all the socialized health care systems perform more efficiently.
transaction costs are outweighed by government inefficiency. also the point is that you have a choice, if you decide that you want to take a risk with all your money because you need all of it to maximize the chance of success you take responsibility for what could happen if your enterprise doesn't succeed, and if something happens to your health, you can do so if you want because it's your money, and you worked hard for it.
I actually think there's economies of scale in all insurance systems that makes it so that the government should be the one handling insurance, because insurance doesn't function the same way as goods or services.
If a lot of the harmful regulations get uplifted, then insurance can easily be replaced with other things, like personal medical fund account, or just plain old personal savings.
You're missing the point where the way the cost of insurance gets determined is by weighted average cost x weighted average chance of need for treatment + some extra for company expenses + profit.
Right now the healthcare system is fucked up, so everything is way over priced, and etc. but in reality healthcare isn't so absolutely expensive, because if it was, then how could the insurance companies ever afford it for you.
And you say that the private systems do better than government, but if that were true, then the private fire fighting system wouldn't have been replaced by the socialized one. I'm using history to counter the myth of the perfect free market.
Well the government probably has way more resources in the fire fighting system than the private sector did.
If the free market was always better than government, then it wouldn't ever cause problems for people to deviate away from it. And if the free market was efficient, the electric companies would have implemented electricity in rural areas without government involvement. But they didn't. The government had to step in and subsidize the electric power companies to provide rural electricity. If there's a a rural Republican party versus urban Democratic party divide, then the hypocritical Republicans should forego their electricity if they hate government so much.
There are some exceptions obviously... But it's obvious that the free market wasn't purely at work in denying electricity to rural areas, unless they had a price that was unaffordable which would more than likely be due to regulations of large land properties and such.
The socialized health care systems are still more efficient. You want to say transactional costs are outweighed by government bureaucracy, but that's not the case. All of the other first world health care systems are saving their citizens money. The socialized systems are more efficient and the free market health care system of the United States is the one that's a terrible system of inefficiency. Canada has the worst efficiency out of the socialized health care systems, but it's doing better than the States. If the free market was better at everything, then it should also be better at providing health care. But it isn't. It's a contradiction in your argument.
I don't think that's fair. US doesn't have a fully free market healthcare system, and it's pretty corrupt right now.
So there's nothing to compare social health care to really. I think that the cost of health insurance can be significantly reduced by curbing liability if the patient agrees to doing so. I don't think that the transaction costs will outweigh government bureaucracy in such a technically specific field, where one size fits all type deals will prove to be extremely wasteful.
On the other hand insurance companies can't be small or they'd be too risky. Maybe healthcare savings is a better idea in general, but all these things that if socialized would be mandated, I feel can also be provided by the free market if they are actually effective.
Looking at the previous five pages, I can only shake my head. You guys are neck to neck with China in a race to the bottom if any of the Republican candidates win, and half of you will fucking deserve it for voting against your interests. 1-2% of you will profit beyond your wildest dreams on the backs of the other 98%, wait, it's already happening.
This whole bullshit about government wasting money that's better off is private hands is simply missing the point. The vast amounts of money funneled to the American wealthy individuals in the last two decades have gone on to fuel a massive industry that's focused on shuffling money around and magically creating profit out of thin air (aka. the booming financial industry). The very fact that the financial industry is such a dominating sector of the US economy should set off alarm bells about what the wealthy do with money given to them (let it be managed by wealth managers).
Yet, in the face of all of this, people have the funny notion that the mega-rich and giant corporations really aren't rich enough to create jobs and start companies. Really? They can buy entire fucking countries in Africa with the sums that they spend on acquisitions but when it comes to meeting market demands, they're too bloody poor to start up a new product line that has profit written all over it? Bullshit.
On top of all of that, you have this ridiculous anti-government sentiment where its argued that the government only wastes money that could be spent by the private sector. In case you haven't noticed, US executive compensation in the last decade or so has skyrocketed to frankly absurd levels. This should be a giant red flag to those that hypothesize that the private sector tends towards efficiency. Are we to suppose now that the executive of today was ten, twenty or fifty times more capable than the exec of thirty years ago? Keeping costs low only applies apparently to the wages of the working class, not so for the upperclass who wantonly inflate their compensation because of information asymmetry that prevents their feet from being held to the same fire that they hold their employees to.
Then we also have the cherry on top of the cake, the notion that dismantling regulations, minimum wages, labor laws and unions will somehow lead to a massive surge of job creation. People DIED for the right to be unionized, because before collective bargaining, people worked in terrible conditions for COMPANY SCRIP! That's right, you didn't even get MONEY, you got a voucher redeemable for goods at the company's prices! It was economic slavery papered over with a sneeze of free market ideology. When you bargain with power asymmetries, someone will get screwed over. Why, in the name of all that's good, would anyone choose to reinstate the tender mercies of the "free market" on themselves by rolling back all the protections that your country has put into place. Protections, that I might remind you, were given the force of law precisely because of past abuses.
Where in all of this policy talk does the well-being of the population come in? The false dichotomy being presented here is either you, the working class, accept a degradation of your living standards and conditions, or everyone goes bust. Bull-fucking-shit. The US is not bankrupt, it's still immensely rich, but all that wealth is circulating like fetid sewage through your mockery of a banking system and your two tiered economy and all it's doing is further expanding the power and ownership of a tiny minority.
Stop working against yourselves and realize that the only remotely reasonable candidate of the Republican party has apparently been doomed by his embrace of reality.
On September 14 2011 13:06 hummingbird23 wrote: Looking at the previous five pages, I can only shake my head. You guys are neck to neck with China in a race to the bottom if any of the Republican candidates win, and half of you will fucking deserve it for voting against your interests. 1-2% of you will profit beyond your wildest dreams on the backs of the other 98%, wait, it's already happening.
This whole bullshit about government wasting money that's better off is private hands is simply missing the point. The vast amounts of money funneled to the American wealthy individuals in the last two decades have gone on to fuel a massive industry that's focused on shuffling money around and magically creating profit out of thin air (aka. the booming financial industry). The very fact that the financial industry is such a dominating sector of the US economy should set off alarm bells about what the wealthy do with money given to them (let it be managed by wealth managers).
Yet, in the face of all of this, people have the funny notion that the mega-rich and giant corporations really aren't rich enough to create jobs and start companies. Really? They can buy entire fucking countries in Africa with the sums that they spend on acquisitions but when it comes to meeting market demands, they're too bloody poor to start up a new product line that has profit written all over it? Bullshit.
On top of all of that, you have this ridiculous anti-government sentiment where its argued that the government only wastes money that could be spent by the private sector. In case you haven't noticed, US executive compensation in the last decade or so has skyrocketed to frankly absurd levels. This should be a giant red flag to those that hypothesize that the private sector tends towards efficiency. Are we to suppose now that the executive of today was ten, twenty or fifty times more capable than the exec of thirty years ago? Keeping costs low only applies apparently to the wages of the working class, not so for the upperclass who wantonly inflate their compensation because of information asymmetry that prevents their feet from being held to the same fire that they hold their employees to.
Then we also have the cherry on top of the cake, the notion that dismantling regulations, minimum wages, labor laws and unions will somehow lead to a massive surge of job creation. People DIED for the right to be unionized, because before collective bargaining, people worked in terrible conditions for COMPANY SCRIP! That's right, you didn't even get MONEY, you got a voucher redeemable for goods at the company's prices! It was economic slavery papered over with a sneeze of free market ideology. When you bargain with power asymmetries, someone will get screwed over. Why, in the name of all that's good, would anyone choose to reinstate the tender mercies of the "free market" on themselves by rolling back all the protections that your country has put into place. Protections, that I might remind you, were given the force of law precisely because of past abuses.
Where in all of this policy talk does the well-being of the population come in? The false dichotomy being presented here is either you, the working class, accept a degradation of your living standards and conditions, or everyone goes bust. Bull-fucking-shit. The US is not bankrupt, it's still immensely rich, but all that wealth is circulating like fetid sewage through your mockery of a banking system and your two tiered economy and all it's doing is further expanding the power and ownership of a tiny minority.
Stop working against yourselves and realize that the only remotely reasonable candidate of the Republican party has apparently been doomed by his embrace of reality.
This sums things up pretty well. I agree. I would vote for Huntsman honestly, but he has no chance of winning the nomination, so I'll probably wind up voting for Obama.
EPT
) and i can't believe Ron Paul was boo'ed when he said the whole Muslim world doesn't hate/want to kill the US/West. I was in shock.
