I do so love it when liberals tell me that there is no socialism in their burning desire for Health Care Reform. I’m sure I’d feel reassured, if it weren’t for administration appointees like Dr. Donald Berwick.
“You could have had a monstrous insurance industry of claims and rules and paper-pushing instead of using your tax base to provide a single route of finance. You could have protected the wealthy and the well, instead of recognizing that sick people tend to be poorer and that poor people tend to be sicker. And that any health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized and humane must—must–redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent health care is by definition redistributional. Britain, you chose well.”
Surely, this must have been a mistake.
or maybe not…
OK – I will bite….
We have argued this elsewhere, but why not here too….
A bit of redistribution does not socialism make. We have had a progressive income tax for years. It entails a bit of redistribution, yes – but you know what? It doesn’t seem to have caused to many problems for the rich in our country. They seem to be doing just fine.
True socialism would amount to complete redistribution of wealth to the point that all were made equal. Nobody is advocating that.
So – BiW – I am curious. Do you really believe that having individuals amassing huge riches – wealth for wealth’s sake – without giving anything back to the society that has allowed them to amass such riches – is a desirable thing?
I just wrote a piece over on my blog pointing to some negative consequences of extreme wealth – using an example I suspect most conservatives could relate to. See what you think:
http://hippieprofessor.com/2010/07/08/paris-hilton-welfare-queen/
Actually, I thought that I had put this into draft, because I couldn’t get the footage of the good doctor saying it and of Gibbs not answering questions about this to embed.
However, theft is theft. Making someone who makes more pay more, so you can give it to someone who makes less is theft.
So – BiW – I am curious. Do you really believe that having individuals amassing huge riches – wealth for wealth’s sake – without giving anything back to the society that has allowed them to amass such riches – is a desirable thing?
This really is a non-starter. You can advocate for choice as means to legitimize infanticide, but someone cannot be free choose to “amass huge riches” without having government step in and take some of it to give to someone else? Do you realize the absurd result that brings you to? What do you think it does to society to have a government that sanctions murder, and commits theft?
It also ignores the fact that “wealth” is not generated in a vacuum. Bill Gates became a very rich man by making (and stealing) software. He also employs many people around the world who all make very good wages, and contribute to society. He also has directed a great deal of his own money into charitable endeavors, and still pays a greater percentage of his income in taxes than you or I. The same would be true of the “robber barons” of old, the Progressives’ favorite raison d’etre. Carnegie, Rockafeller, Du Pont. They amassed enormous wealth…fortunes that still exist today, but they also employed a great many people along the way, and contributed generously to charities. But even without their chartible contributions, they still created jobs. Carnegie made the steel…the steel that went into skyscrapers, the steel that went into railroads, the steel that went into household products, and ships, and …
And if he chose to be non-charitable after making jobs and careers possible for so many people, that is his choice. It is not an excuse for you or anyone else to decide he hasn’t contributed to society. I can think of few things less American than condemning rather than celebrating a person’s success in creating wealth and an increased standard of living for so many people.
Do I personally think that amssing wealth for wealth’s sake is a desirable endeavor? No. But my faith informs my thinking on the subject. Do I think that that gives me the right to decide that someone “makes enough” and needs to give to someone who has less? No, if only because I wouldn’t find it worthy provocation for taking something that belongs to someone else.
A bit of redistribution does not socialism make.
A serious problem with redistribution is that it is like eating a potato chip…a little bit won’t do. First its a little bit, then its a little bit more, and then we’re saying silly things like “Health Insurance is a right!” or “College Education is right!” or something else designed to impose equality of condition (or the tryanny of mediocrity, if we’re being honest) on us all.
A serious problem with redistribution is that it is like eating a potato chip…a little bit won’t do.
I guess that explains why the top marginal rates were in the 90 percent range back in the 1950s (Eisenhower years) and only dropped below 40 percent in the last couple of decades…..
“Redistribution” is not “socialism.” Can we get that straight?
Socialism is an economic and political theory based on public or common ownership and cooperative management of the means of production and allocation of resources.
Even if something can be defined correctly as “socialism” – so what? BIC has already heard my examples of “socialized” parts of the American economy: police, fire, utilities (in some jurisdictions), the Post Office, and even the formerly free-market trash service socialized by former Tulsa mayor James Inhofe. All of those things USED to be handled by private enterprise, and private enterprise failed. Their socialized replacements actually work. Privatizing government functions – like prisons? Disaster.
But I digress. As I told BIC on Rutherford’s blog, taxes are always redistributional if they are not levied on each person equally. I’m sure BIC isn’t ready to advocate something as extreme as a pure head tax. But until he is, his whining about “redistribution” and “confiscation” and “theft” are pure hypocrisy.
What is really going on here? Any time that the Right Wing Noise Machine hears the word “redistribution,” they wet their collective pants and go into a full-court press – as we see right now over Dr. Berwick’s quotation.
Never mind that the quotation from Berwick is a simple truism – unless we are ready to let people who can’t pay for their own health care die in the streets, someone else will have to pay to treat them. That IS redistribution, and we have that now. We even had it before Obamacare. What is so controversial?
Why aren’t people dying in the streets now Graychin? Millions can’t pay for their own health care this minute.
BIC, I live in the same town Graychin did – this entire paragraph is a lie, baloney, and garbage. Privatize with “public workers” would be more like it.
The fact that Graychin would brag about the public post office shows how irrational the poor man is. The Tulsa Police Force sucks, fraught with multimillion, multi-year racial lawsuits, threats to charge us additional dollars on our city bill to not be personally liable for fire service (I kid you not), our trash service is being threatened to be changed to one a week service instead of twice a week. There isn’t a public service in this town worth a shit.
Don’t let this poseur and blowhard fool you…he’s full of it, as usual.
“Socialism” — “A social system in which the producers possess both political power and the means of producing and distributing goods …… In Marxist-Leninist theory, the building of the material base for communism under the dictatorship of the proletariat”. (from the American Heritage Dictionary)
The key word here is “proletariat”, which is from the Roman terminology identifying the “lowest class of citizen”. Since there is always some form of government involved in redistribution of wealth, then true socialism is not involved, nor could the wealthy industrialists who have amassed huge assets be part of such a “pure” system.
Semantics aside, the wealthy will always be a target for taxation to support government of some sort. I would suggest that they have earned any amount of money that they can keep out of the government’s clutches and that there will always be a working agreement between government and industry to prevent the slaughter of the golden goose. Otherwise, there is no wealth to redistribute.
The term “dictatorship” more closely describes the direction in which the current administration is taking us.
The term “dictatorship” more closely describes the direction in which the current administration is taking us.
Maine, you were actually coming close to making sense prior to that last line?
Dictatorship? Come on, guy – you have absolutely no justification for making that claim.
We are going have elections in 2012. If Obama loses, we will have an orderly transfer of power just like we always do. If Obama wins, we will have that same transfer of power four years later.
If I am wrong then lend me a gun and I will be right out there in the streets protesting with you…
A dictatorship is described as “a state or government under dictatorial rule” (that damned dictionary, again). Unless I completely misunderstand current information, the current administration has imposed a health care piece of legislation and several bailouts (one of which was a holdover from the previous administration), plus proposals for legislation involving tax and trade on carbon emissions and an enormous (as usual) “financial reform bill” – all of which are opposed by a majority of the American public. All of this carried through the manipulations of an administration dedicated to “change” and “transparency”.
The “orderly transfer of power”, now or later, hardly guarantees a less dictatorial ruling class since both Republicans and Democrats have eagerly sought the assumptions of power that I just described.
I did not say that we are currently under a dictatorship, just that I felt that we are headed in that direction. If we don’t start electing representatives who are more responsive to the people, it may be a short journey.
I was not aware that my opinions were required to be “justified”, to you, or to anyone else. You may not agree with what I have to say, but instead of patronizing me offer a counter argument.
By the way, to me, guns are a last resort – protests can be effective here on the web or on the street. If it comes to armed revolt, we have already lost our Republic.
Real dishonest comparison of marginal tax rates Hippie, and you need to review your history to make a fair comparison.
When marginal tax rates were 91% in 1963, that was applicable to a taxable income of $400,000+ in 1963 dollars. What would that make the top tax rate today? Say around $2,000,000.00 give or take a degree?
When the marginal tax rate for top income was 39.1%, the last year being 2001, the top was applicable at $300,000.
So you’ll note that although you are historically correct about marginal tax rates being higher, the proportional income that was applicable to those rates was much higher too.
And since two people with professional incomes combined is now far more common due to substantial higher aggregate taxes, health care, fees, services, even higher education, the real people getting squeezed are not the rich, who simply defer income with attorneys and accountants, but small business owners and professionals that are hardly rich and would best be defined as upper middle class. I know – several years ago, I used to be one.
Tex said: When marginal tax rates were 91% in 1963, that was applicable to a taxable income of $400,000+ in 1963 dollars. What would that make the top tax rate today? Say around $2,000,000.00 give or take a degree?
Ummm… Tex…. you are kinda making my point for me.
Lets say that someone making 400k (taxable income) in 1963 is equally rich as someone making 2 mil today.
In 1963 we took 91 percent of each dollar over that 400k. Today we take a tad less than 40 percent of each dollar over 2 mil.
That sounds to me like we are a lot easier on the rich now than we were back in 1963.
What has happened is we have shifted the tax burden from the rich to the middle class. That does not seem like such a great idea to me….
No doubt, federal taxes have decreased since 1960 and you have a legitimate point. I do concede that federal tax rates much higher. But that’s not the real argument. The real argument is “are marginal tax rates progressive enough?” Right?
———————————
** In 1980, the top 10 percent of households, as measured by income, paid 40.6 percent of all federal taxes; other ninety percent paid 59.4 percent.
Twenty five years later, the top 10 percent accounted for nearly 55 percent of all federal tax revenues, while the rest of the population paid about 45 percent.
** Source – CBO
If the rich aren’t paying their fair share, why are they accounting for 15% more of all federal taxes paid twenty five years later?
And if you’re truly concerned about the middle class being squeezed, why are you not accounting for payroll taxes which are now more than twice as high as 1960? If memory serves, and I can’t remember where I read this but I’ll stand by it, for about 75% of taxpayers, payroll taxes are a bigger burden than income taxes.
But tax revenues don’t back you up. You can claim the rich have gotten richer and they have, but they are also the ones that create wealth and employment. If you want to argue the fairness of some of these outrageous bonuses, we might get closer to agreement – but I don’t think that is what you’re arguing for.
So here is my real point. When Ronald Reagan slashed the top marginal rates from 50 percen to 28 percent after the 1986 Tax Reform Act, total tax receipts in the 1980s doubled from $517 billion in 1981 to $1,030 billion in 1990. In 1980, the top 5 percent of income earners paid only 37 percent of all income taxes. Today, the top 1 percent pay that proportion, and the top 5 percent pay 57 percent.
Lower tax rates made the tax system more progressive, not less so.
Tex….
The CBO data are indeed interesting…… but they demonstrate something you may have missed.
In 1980 the top marginal rate is 70 percent (and stays high across the spectrum) – and the top 10 percent pay 40.5 percent of taxes.
In 2005 (25 years later) the top marginal rate is 35 percent – yet the top 10 percent pay 55 percent of taxes.
The only way for these numbers to make sense is if the top 10 percent are making a LOT more money (relative to everyone else) than they were back in 1980. How else would their share of taxes increase while their tax rate went down?
This illustrates the growing income gap I have mentioned in the past – a gap which, as I remember, you denied existed.
Apropos to my previous point:
http://talkandpolitics.wordpress.com/2010/07/10/transfer-of-wealth-us-society/
Oh – Tex – I just located the full historical tax tables – the ones that show all the rates and not just the top marginal rate.
You can find it here:
http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/federalindividualratehistory-20080107.pdf
Take a look at 1963. Using your “400k then is 2 mil now” lets see what 300k now would be…. we simply divide by five – which gives us 60k in 1963 dollars. We will round up to 64 k because that is where the tax table makes the break…
In 1963 the marginal rate above 64 k was…. (drumroll please…)
65 percent.
So – even at a modest upper middle class income the marginal rate was still a lot higher in 1963.
Where have I denied that? I think you have me confused with someone else, because I’ve noted on more than one occasion at your own blog the rich have gotten richer, and I think I even mentioned that I’ve gotten cross wise with many fiscally conservative folk about one person being both CEO and Chairman of the Board.
I make them scream even more when I’ve mentioned that some bonuses on Wall Street are an outrage, and that America is going the way of the Roman Empire when it comes to sports and what we happily pay room temperature idiots to put a ball in a hoop – i.e. Lebron James.
I think where you and I have disagreed is about what constitutes rich, and I have used my wife and I as examples of being defined as ‘rich’ and being anything but. We were just two people with white collar incomes.
Hippie, it’s not the “rich” getting soaked, but upper middle class folk, of which my wife and I marginally were at one time.
The real rich can afford clever attorneys and accountants to simply defer income, shelter the income, and the like. Your progressive tax structure actually is penalizing the people like small business owners, and I don’t know how with a straight face you can deny that.
So my original comment to you was to point out the scale of being defined as “rich” continues to drop.
I do now admit ignorance that in ’60, I thought the percentages dropped more significantly than that. On that one, you got me. But I was not lying – simply rotten memory and I should have researched that further before jumping you.
Tex asked…. Where have I denied that?
Tex – it may well not have been you. I have been having a conversation about the income gap in various places, and in a couple of places people have denied the gap existed. I apologize if I misremembered….
I make them scream even more when I’ve mentioned that some bonuses on Wall Street are an outrage, and that America is going the way of the Roman Empire when it comes to sports and what we happily pay room temperature idiots to put a ball in a hoop – i.e. Lebron James.
Wow – we are really in agreement on this one. I believe that your position does put you at odds with BiW, though – who would believe that progressive taxation of the ultra-rich amounts to theft.
Hippie, it’s not the “rich” getting soaked, but upper middle class folk, of which my wife and I marginally were at one time. The real rich can afford clever attorneys and accountants to simply defer income, shelter the income, and the like.
Again, I agree – this is getting scary…..
Your progressive tax structure actually is penalizing the people like small business owners, and I don’t know how with a straight face you can deny that.
Perhaps you are right about the current tax code – but this is not necessarily the case with any progressive tax structure. I wouldn’t mind going back to the 90 percent tax rate for the LeBrons and ARoids and hedge fund managers and CEOs while lowering the tax on the middle class.
BiW would call it theft. Do you?
Hippie,
If I had anything to do with what professional sports has become, I would cut athletes salaries to about $20K a year and let most of these “stars” find out what a flunking GPA in two years of physical education is really worth.
On a more serious note:
The real problem with professional sports, and this spans all political parties and all types of people, are that weak willed and insecure people will fork out thousands of dollars to attend overrated and uncomfortable athletic events, while leaving their children in rotten schools, or maxing the credit cards, or missing their house payments.
You may have laughed at me when I said I thought America was quickly becoming the revived Roman Empire – I wasn’t kidding.
I half way expect sometime in the near future to see gladiators as half-time entertainment at professional venues. And college sports are getting every bit as bad.
Tex said: You may have laughed at me when I said I thought America was quickly becoming the revived Roman Empire – I wasn’t kidding. I half way expect sometime in the near future to see gladiators as half-time entertainment at professional venues. And college sports are getting every bit as bad.
Back in the 1980s, Stephen King (writing under the pseudonym Richard Bachman) wrote a novella called The Running Man. It was later made into a very bad movie by the current California governor… but the book itself is pretty interesting.
In the book, TV offers a wide variety of “game shows” which look a hell of a lot like modern “reality” TV – all about 20 years prior to reality TV shows making their big showing. The only difference is that King’s reality shows were a tad more lethal. But, as you say, that may well be coming.
I never imagined that Stephen King would be prophetic….
One other quick comment to goad you: It is the unregulated free market that results in athletes (and others) being frightfully overpaid. The “weak willed” you describe are likewise freely choosing consumers – who are we to cast judgment on how they spend their money?
Tex – there are moments when you almost sound like a liberal…..
“Unless we are ready to let people who can’t pay for their own health care die in the streets, someone else will have to pay to treat them. ”
Why aren’t people dying in the streets now Graychin? Millions can’t pay for their own health care this minute.
Tex, people aren’t dying in the streets now (most of them anyway) because you and I are helping to pay for their health care. Isn’t that obvious?
That is “redistribution,” pure and simple. Like Berwick said.
Maine looks up socialism in his dictionary and goes straight for its Marxist-Leninist usage.
News flash – Marxism is a form of socialism, but not all socialism is Marxism. Your government-run water supply is socialism, but it isn’t Marxism.
Is forcing you and me pay for other people’s health care – like we do already – “redistribution”? Yes.
Is it “socialism”? No.
graychin,
Sure, I included Marxist-Leninist theory; it is part of the definition. You will note, however, that I also included the rest (or first part) of the definition. You seem to be the one who “zeroed-in”.
“Your government-run water supply is socialism”. Following that line of reasoning, forcing the public into a government-run health care program by manipulating the pricing structure or imposing fines on those who refuse to purchase health insurance could indeed be classified as socialism.
Redistribution is enforced through taxes – the government again.
Since our government is now composed of a ruling class inspired by the introduction of progressivism, scarcely composed from the proletariat, then I would agree that we are not truly under a socialist regime.
I complain about CEO’s compensation when that compensation is negotiated with their own appointed lapdogs on corporate boards, and not at arms’ length. The lapdog corporate directors are using shareholders’ money to buy their own continuing and highly-paid positions as corporate directors. (Shareholders elect directors? Theoretically, yes. In reality, no.)
But I will never complain about athletes’ salaries, any more than I would complain about what film stars are paid to make movies. At the core, both have the same function – to sell tickets – and it’s very easy to measure how good a job they are doing at that function.
But CEO’s, athletes, and film stars should all be in a higher marginal tax bracket!
To goad you in return Hippie:
You’re half right. What you call unregulated free market does have one inherent weakness: when demand exceeds for whatever reason the supply, prices are sure to go up. And while the model works beautifully for things of real utility like cars, electronic gadgets, and groceries, it can’t overcome many a man’s need to continually be “entertained”.
I say you’re half right because the collective bargaining power of player’s unions also is a major cog in restoring some semblance of pricing responsibility. As long as they are filling the seats, rest assured the madness will continue.
Until people regain their senses in this country (and I don’t see that happening anytime soon), we will happily continue to buy $200 nose bleed seats, drinking $7.00 watered-down beer in plastic cups, sitting in seats about half the width of our ass, to watch Lebron do a gorilla dunk from one-hundred yards away. Me, if I bother to watch it, will do so from the comfort of my family room, with $1.00 beer in hand, in a large recliner, and my own bathroom twenty feet away.
But like you, I find something inherently weak about our national character when we watch some malignant, half-literate narcissist make a spectacle of where he is to reign next to the cheers and boos of millions, while somebody serving the meals we eat while working like beasts of the field, gets to work for tips. Always tip good in the breakfast place.
On a side note, I read somewhere were somebody had objectivity evaluated the real worth of a professional franchise to a city, and financial most were huge net loss, especially when the construction of ever larger arenas was considered.
And on this one point, my part of the country is the most sinful and stupid.
Tex said: On a side note, I read somewhere were somebody had objectivity evaluated the real worth of a professional franchise to a city, and financial most were huge net loss, especially when the construction of ever larger arenas was considered. And on this one point, my part of the country is the most sinful and stupid.
Yeah – I know where you read that. It was when you Oklahoma Bandits stole my basketball team….
You put the guy on the stand to prove that Seattle wasn’t really losing anything to see the team go. Of course, that didn’t really explain why you wanted it so much…..
Oh no no no Hippie – on this one, I’ve got you because I know bohunk fans of Oklahoma better than you could ever dream.
In fact, my rant above really about local Oklahoma fans, especially OU fans, most never affiliated with the school. See, I received a free $175 ticket on the forty yard line to watch the last OU/OSU football game in Stillwater in the freezing cold, complete with $13 meat burger and stale $4.00 pretzel.
No, actually the study I was reading was before your beloved and rotten Sonics moved to God’s country to become a contender.
This was some years back and took an aggregate look at the completion of ten years worth of data about new stadiums and professional sports teams real impact.
I can’t find the study thru google.
Paul Bunyan,
Super! I agree. So since that meets your criteria for “redistribution” and “coverage”, we can shit can the need for the enlarged tick called Bongo Care since there’s no need.
That is “redistribution,” pure and simple. Like Berwick said.
Not quite – your Marxist above favors the British System of Health Care – and that is socialized medicine. And it sucks. Dying on the streets or dying waiting to see a physician, death is death. Don’t believe me, check out the British death rate from prostrate cancer vs. the U.S..
Hell, Bongo may hear of gross negligence in some government VA hospital and stop the practice of health care completely while “MY OBAMA” staff evaluates why.
No thanks…
“Prostrate” cancer? I thought you went to medical school!
So since that meets your criteria for “redistribution” and “coverage”…
It does no such thing.
My point (as you know) was that wetting yourself over “redistribution” is just silly because we have it now.
Boy, I did blow that one. Did that talking to my neighbor the other day too!
Make that prostate cancer, and I humbly prostrate myself at your finding.
Now that was embarrassing.
Bravo!
I knew that you knew better, but I was expecting you to call me a dummy for not catching your clever “joke.”
That wasn’t so hard, was it?
On a side note, I read somewhere were somebody had objectivity evaluated the real worth of a professional franchise to a city, and financial most were huge net loss, especially when the construction of ever larger arenas was considered.
And on this one point, my part of the country is the most sinful and stupid.
And I for one am thankful. I never liked the Sonics anyway.
Bravo!
I knew that you knew better, but I was expecting you to call me a dummy for not catching your clever “joke.”
That wasn’t so hard, was it?
I’m thrilled that Tex’s spelling error provided Chin with a shining moment of validation. On the other hand, I suppose Chin has to celebrate the little victories where he finds them, and if he can’t win on substance, the form victory will have to be worthy.
As I told BIC on Rutherford’s blog, taxes are always redistributional if they are not levied on each person equally. I’m sure BIC isn’t ready to advocate something as extreme as a pure head tax.
You are always so sure of things you know nothing about. If one thing became very clear to me when I was earning my LL.M. in taxation, it is that it is neither the nation or the body politic that is served by a tax code and regulations that take up thousands of pages. While it gives Congress something to do when it isn’t addressing other issues, having them engage in a tug-of-war over Americans’ tax dollars really serves no one but the politicians in the end.
I don’t know that I do support a head tax. I do support a tax where EVERYONE pays the same percentage of their income, no exceptions. That way, everyone has “skin in the game”, to use the Chicago Messiah’s™ terminology. It removes the incentive for the new dependent class to reelect the overseers of the new plantation based on belief that they will make their lives better at the expense of others, and because it removes that portion of the politcal class that long ago conflated “General Welfare” with “Specific Welfare”.
I do support a tax where EVERYONE pays the same percentage of their income, no exceptions.
I don’t even know where to begin. You are all about trying to avoid theft. A flat tax is theft from the poor to feed the rich – who as I mentioned are doing just fine. Every wonder why it is well-to-do folks who like this so much?
How about we tax on marginal value? Ten bucks means nothing to a billionaire. It means a lot to a person in poverty. So, we apply marginal value curves and equalize “taxation pain” at each level of income.
Come to think of it – that actually sounds fair to me….
When did it become a priority to decide that alieviating anyone’s pain in paying taxes was a desirable goal?
(It isn’t an accident that the country existed for over one hundred years without a permanent federal income tax)
When you have a stake in the game because you have to pay in, you suddenly become more interested in how it is spent. Suddenly it isn’t about electing people who will talk about making your life better by confiscation of what other people earn. I can think of no better motivation for actually paying attention to who you elect and why, and I can fathom no better way that spending and borrowing gets dialed back before NONE of us has any choice about how much we have to pay, just to service the debt.
When did it become a priority to decide that alieviating anyone’s pain in paying taxes was a desirable goal?
When I asked my conscience about it.
There is no doubt that a flat tax places more pain upon the poor than it does the rich – as if the poor were not already dealing with enough pain already.
Lets do some numbers…. say we have a 10 percent flat tax.
Hmm…. that will be $2000.00 to the guy making 20k. That $2000.00 will make a big difference is just meeting the basic costs of living.
Now, lets look at the guy pulling in 2mil a year. That will cost him 200k in taxes. Seems like a lot – bit won’t impact his ability to meet basic cost of living in the slightest. Oh – he might have to put off buying that yacht for a month or two – but that isn’t really much in the way of pain.
Seriously – you think that is OK? A tax that will impart pain on the poor and really have no effect on the rich?
Bravo!
I knew that you knew better, but I was expecting you to call me a dummy for not catching your clever “joke.”
That wasn’t so hard, was it?
Are you kidding. I’m my own best audience! Had it been anybody but you, I would have provided a LOL instead of an oops.
Frankly, I’m equally as surprised that you might recognize that I actually knew the difference between the two, and willing to recognize it a mistake rather than a lack of knowledge.
Not quite – your Marxist above favors the British System of Health Care – and that is socialized medicine. And it sucks. Dying on the streets or dying waiting to see a physician, death is death. Don’t believe me, check out the British death rate from prostrate cancer vs. the U.S..
I would add to that, dying because someone else has determined that your life is not worth the cost of the drug that could save it, and once you pay for everyone else’s care, you might not have enough to make that decision for yourself anymore; your individual rights and decisions have been surrendered to the collective. That goes against the guarantees of the rights of the individual that are the cornerstone of American political and legal thought.
I would add to that, dying because someone else has determined that your life is not worth the cost of the drug that could save it, and once you pay for everyone else’s care, you might not have enough to make that decision for yourself anymore; your individual rights and decisions have been surrendered to the collective. That goes against the guarantees of the rights of the individual that are the cornerstone of American political and legal thought.
Are you saying that if someone can’t pay for a drug that would save his life – he should just be left in the street to die? Because we can’t take the chance that somewhere down the road, in a speculative future, someone else might not be able to afford a that same drug because his taxes are a tad too high?
I’m really not trying to caricature what you said, but – isn’t that what you just said?
Now, lets look at the guy pulling in 2mil a year. That will cost him 200k in taxes. Seems like a lot – bit won’t impact his ability to meet basic cost of living in the slightest. Oh – he might have to put off buying that yacht for a month or two – but that isn’t really much in the way of pain.
1. The “rich” guy cares because he is already paying taxes. Trust me, I do a lot to help them mitigate the impact of the taxes that they pay.
2. If you assume that they are going to buy that yacht, who do you think builds it? And what happens to that guy’s employment prospects if the rich guy holds off on buying that yacht when he is faced with a Congress that makes no bones about its willingness to dig deeper in his pockets to help support the “poor”? Seriously, if you take this farther, you get taxes raised on the rich and the rich leaving, and having less and less incentive to create jobs for others. Then you have even fewer and fewer paying for more and more. Welfare doesn’t create wealth and it doesn’t improve anyone’s prospects. It does divert money away from the poor to pay for the bureaucracy that will parcel out what remains of the other people’s money taken from them. See New York, State of.
Seriously – you think that is OK? A tax that will impart pain on the poor and really have no effect on the rich?
Seriously – you think that is OK? Taxing people who can move to escape the tax, while taking away their spending, and reducing employment opportunities, while building government bureaucracies that become obsessed growing and finding more ways to justify their own existence by increased dependency in those they help?
Are you saying that if someone can’t pay for a drug that would save his life – he should just be left in the street to die? Because we can’t take the chance that somewhere down the road, in a speculative future, someone else might not be able to afford a that same drug because his taxes are a tad too high?
I’m saying that in the health care scheme you so enthusiastically root for, one only needs to look to other countries, such as England, where breast cancer patients are denied the drugs that would be part of the standard course of treatment here in our “Unfair” and “Unethical” health care system, because a beancounter in London decided that the drug “costs too much”.
England has socialized medicine, as “socialism” is correctly defined. The United States does not, and will not under Obamacare. I have never “rooted for” full-blown socialized medicine here, enthusiastically or otherwise.
because a beancounter in
LondonHartford or Omaha decided that the drug “costs too much”.Could that happen in America? Oops, it already does under free-market private-enterprise for-profit health care.
I’ll take my chances any day with a government bureaucrat over a slimy insurance CEO who gets a share of his company’s bottom line and has a financial incentive to cut off my expensive meds – because they “cost too much.”
It appears that I characterized your earlier comment correctly. Your ideological position is more important to you than preventing a real human being from dying in the street.
People in the UK face longer waits for non-emergency surgery and struggle to see GPs out-of-hours compared with other western countries, a survey says.
BiW said: Seriously, if you take this farther, you get taxes raised on the rich and the rich leaving, and having less and less incentive to create jobs for others.
This might be a reasonable complaint if all of that money saved in taxation was invested right back into the US economy. But of course it isn’t. The Reagan/Bush tax cuts have done wonders for the growth of the middle class – in places like India. The guy making 2 mil is probably buying a second mansion in Bermuda – not in Key West – not because of taxation issues but because Bermuda is a better getaway for the rich.
I’ll take my chances any day with a government bureaucrat over a slimy insurance CEO who gets a share of his company’s bottom line and has a financial incentive to cut off my expensive meds – because they “cost too much.”
hear hear!
I am always amazed at people who complain about “death panels” in the new HCR Bill, but are perfectly OK with the “lifetime limits” that are found in virtually every insurance policy. A “lifetime limit” says “your life is only worth this much…” in no uncertain terms.
HP, did you consider the impact of labor costs (read union) on the migration of jobs overseas? What about corporate taxes?
You are asking that business accept massive amounts of financial losses. Why, and based on this answer, how is it not socialist to expect as much? The impression I’m getting from you is that your defense of liberal policies not being socialist is that they’re not completely socialist. A little bit of socialism is ok.
Doesn’t business owe something to its shareholders? While yes, there are certainly some wealthy folks who own stocks, the numbers of middle class who own stocks is higher than it has ever been. Is business doing more of a disservice to its shareholders, and thus the middle class, by failing to reap to its full potential? Millions are depending on them for their retirement, which may be a bit more important in the longer term.
From the UK, who might know a thing or two about the wonders of universal healthcare…
Copying the NHS is the last thing the US should do
The US government, meanwhile, is galloping doggedly in the opposite direction, bizarrely determined to occupy precisely the ideological ground which Britain is abandoning. Barack Obama has, indeed, appointed a man as head of the American public health care programmes who professes a passion (no other word will do) for some of the most discredited features of our NHS. Dr Donald Berwick is to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which effectively means that he will be in charge of Obamacare – the new universal health care system on which the President has staked his political credibility.
It appears that I characterized your earlier comment correctly. Your ideological position is more important to you than preventing a real human being from dying in the street.
Oh yes. I tripped over three people this morning just walking from my car to the backdoor of the office…except I didn’t. The local hospital is just down the street. I didn’t see anyone dying in the street there, either.
Percieved need does not make collectivism and the theft necessary to pay for it right or proper.
I’ll take my chances any day with a government bureaucrat over a slimy insurance CEO who gets a share of his company’s bottom line and has a financial incentive to cut off my expensive meds – because they “cost too much.”
Yeah, because those evil insurance companies always nix drugs for entire classes of people…except they don’t. But if I were to ask women in their 40s suffering from breast cancer in England about them getting the same drug that would be the course of treatment here, I would find that that bureaucrat said no. I can certainly see the superiority of that system.
I have, at times, been prescribed a med here and a med there that have been VERY expensive…and through different carriers each time. Know what? My greedy insurance company NEVER said no, and never overode the decision made by my doctor and myself.
The plan rammed through Congress was predicated on lies, deception, and a false sense of urgency, and if you think it delievers what was promised, you might take a look at the new tab above. You were sold an illusion, and even though you have no excuse to still be beguiled, like the dirty-faced Oliver, you hold up your bowl and ask “More, please.”
Government can’t save you. Under the best possible conditions, it might make it possible for you to manage your own affairs decently, but misery and ignominy are the main products of collectivism.
Graybitch, Did you apologize to BiW yet? Or are you only here to start shit?
Fucking commie bitch.