U.S Presidential Election 2016 Not Otherwise Specified

[blackchubby38]

Im a little concerned about Tom Price for Health&Human Services secty. This doctor-legislator has been authoring bills to kill Obamacare and Medicaid for years. Now he's been made boss and can actually do it.

I read an article the other day that said some Republican governors don't want the part of Affordable Care Act that expanded the Medicaid program in their respective states. The fear being that if you kick all those people off Medicaid, they will start using emergency rooms for their primary care providers. So between this and Trump already saying he wants to keep certain parts of the Affordable Care Act that works, I'm still optimistic that it won't be repealed.

Although I do wonder if Republicans would have been more open to the ACA if it didn't have the individual mandate attached to it.

[broncofan]

The last half-hour of the film is a savage attack on Woodrow Wilson, FDR and John Maynard Keynes, with the various claims about the printing of money, debt and borrowing as being unconstitutional and of course, part of Cultural Marxism's attempt to smash capitalism and the USA with it. Keynes is described as an economist 'indoctrinated in the environment of our former enemy' (ie Britain), who with Roosevelt conspired in the New Deal to destroy a Republic founded on free trade.
Thus welfare creates poverty and above all, shifts responsibility from the Christian family (which is no longer Christian) to the State, and the State provides, creating a circle of dependency that boosts the power of the Federal government and its power to levy taxes and print money.

As you indicate, nothing Keynes said, or Roosevelt did during the New Deal could be challenged as unconstitutional, nor is it unconstitutional to run deficits or increase the money supply or do all sorts of things fiscal conservatives think are harmful. There were a series of cases, called the Lochner cases during the early 20th century, where libertarians basically argued that states cannot pass laws that in any way impede the right of two individuals to enter into a contract. This is different from saying that a state cannot impair existing contracts, but would strike down any law that could prospectively interfere with a contract between an employer and an employee. If the Court had not shortly overturned this in an eloquent decision by Justice Holmes, all sorts of employment protections and wage floors and social programs might be held unconstitutional. But otherwise, as you rightly indicate, there's nothing in there that seems to identify any liberal policies that are actually unconstitutional.

[broncofan]

Although I do wonder if Republicans would have been more open to the ACA if it didn't have the individual mandate attached to it.

If it didn't have a mandate attached to it, it's not a system at all. Risk pooling depends upon cross-subsidization between low and high risk individuals. If low risk individuals opt out, you have something called adverse selection, and a remaining pool for health insurance that is not affordable for people who really need it. Given that insurance companies are already not allowed to discriminate against those with pre-existing conditions, without the low risk individuals as part of the pool, they probably can't be competitive.

Low risk individuals also tend to underestimate their risk, and given that we have programs like EMTALA which make emergency care mandatory, their failure to get insurance would increase costs. If you allow people to remain uninsured, you don't have good risk pooling and you also have huge back end costs.

[broncofan]

Actually, the Holmes opinion I"m thinking of is in the dissent of Lochner, but a subsequent case overturned Lochner's endorsement of a fundamental right to contract.

[broncofan]

Although I do wonder if Republicans would have been more open to the ACA if it didn't have the individual mandate attached to it.

And I realize you are trying to identify areas of compromise. Excuse me, I'm just being a spoiled baby. But I did feel that the mandate is what makes the system work.

[Stavros]

As you indicate, nothing Keynes said, or Roosevelt did during the New Deal could be challenged as unconstitutional, nor is it unconstitutional to run deficits or increase the money supply or do all sorts of things fiscal conservatives think are harmful. There were a series of cases, called the Lochner cases during the early 20th century, where libertarians basically argued that states cannot pass laws that in any way impede the right of two individuals to enter into a contract. This is different from saying that a state cannot impair existing contracts, but would strike down any law that could prospectively interfere with a contract between an employer and an employee. If the Court had not shortly overturned this in an eloquent decision by Justice Holmes, all sorts of employment protections and wage floors and social programs might be held unconstitutional. But otherwise, as you rightly indicate, there's nothing in there that seems to identify any liberal policies that are actually unconstitutional.

Some years ago I briefly knew an American woman (resident in London) who insisted that Roosevelt was a Communist and would not accept an alternative argument. The people who made the film and promote these arguments take a severe, minimalist view of what the USA ought to be, based on their interpretation of the Constitution in the context they provide of the American revolution, which they see as a revolution against monarchy, taxation and servility, and for a Republic with little or no taxation and guaranteed liberty. One of the public speakers in the films makes a correlation between the Boston Tea Party protests about a few pence of taxes on tea compared to the lack of protest in the US today over taxes counted in dollars. The debate in the film over the 2nd Amendment revisits the problem Washington had with a standing army that could only be maintained through taxation, thus the interpretation offered is that the 'well armed militia' should be the armed forces of the USA and for this reason every citizen should be armed. The cardinal point being the reluctance of the government to impose taxes on the citizen. It is also part of the free market libertarian view that your money is your private property and should be yours to spend as you wish without any interference from the government. From this perspective, the Federal Reserve is a state-sponsored thief stealing money it does not earn from people who do.
There is no room here for any argument about banking regulation, or the historical evidence that the multiple banking failures in US history took place in an environment where precisely the lack of regulation Rand Paul supports led to their collapse. His view, I assume, would be that the market could not sustain those banks, with little or no sympathy for those people who though the bank was safe, put their money in it, only to be told once it evaporated markets succeed and sometimes they fail.
Crucially, there is no sensible argument about what to do when capitalism fails, and the deep trauma of the depression and the New Deal administration that it led to is not viewed in human terms, but in terms defined by a mis-trust of government and the state. One public speaker suggests that poverty used to be an unfortunate but temporary glitch that people got over, until the government moved in with welfare programmes that stole money from working people to give to unemployed people who thereby had no incentive to work at all so thereby welfare created a class of people permanently unemployed and permanently supported in their idleness by people working. Although the identity of this mass of unemployed dependents is not clearly stated you don't need to be a genius or be familiar with the works of either Charles Murray or Daniel Moynihan to know who is being discussed.

As for Keynes, there is a common mis-perception that his economic theories on state intervention in the economy offered an alternative to free market capitalism, where in fact Keynes offered a temporary solution to economies in recession seeing this as part of an economic cycle. The difference between him and, say Jeavons, is that Keynes argued the worst effects of a recession can be dealt with through the state sponsoring jobs to maintain an equilibrium of supply and demand; his famous remark that it would be better for the state to employ one group of men to dig holes and another to fill them in than leave both idle, was an illustration of the need for money to continue circulating in the economy through wages and consumption.
The difference between then and now, is that in Keynes's day, once the recession had bottomed out, productive capacity would return, bringing more jobs and prosperity with it, and the need for government intervention would recede, and markets would return as the primary form of economic activity. This worked until the de-industrialization and modernizations that began in the 1960s changed the way products are made, and where they are made.
The UK along with the USA has lost productive capacity with regard to what was once called 'heavy industry' and the service and techno industries that have grown since the 1970s just do not create as many jobs. The irony of Trump's insistence that Apple and IBM repatriate jobs from China to the USA is that with modern technology in the form of robotics, Apple may be able to re-locate the whole of its production of computers and phones to the USA but employ less than a thousand people to do it because robotics is now becoming even cheaper than labour in China, indeed, Foxconn is in the process of replacing 60,000 workers in China with robotic production-
http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/25/11...ng-smartphones

What do you do with an army of unemployed people? As modern production is increasingly automated, and as many people do not have the skills to be part of the 'knowledge economy', can markets rather than government provide the jobs needed to give people something to do? Most Americans are now employed by either the Federal or State and local government, but if Trump delivers on some of his promises, the ranks of the unemployed may be about to grow. And who knows where that leads?