Obama Double-Crossed Progressives on Health Care

[Ben]

Obama Double-Crossed Progressives on Health Care
By Matthew Rothschild
December 23, 2009 "The Progressive"

Are you feeling like a chump yet?

If you're a good progressive, and you wanted single-payer health care for all, or, second best, Medicare for All Who Want It, or third best, a robust public option, or fourth best, a paltry public option, now you've got nothing, nada, zippo.

Has it ever crossed your mind that this is the way President Obama wanted it to be?

That he tossed in the public option at the beginning only to get progressives on board, knowing full well that he was going to jettison the public option by the end?

Have you considered that maybe Max Baucus wasn't the problem?

And that maybe Olympia Snowe wasn't the problem?

And that maybe even hideous Joe Lieberman wasn't the problem?

But that Obama himself was the problem?

After all, Obama never once said he wouldn't sign a health care bill that didn't have a public option in it.

After all, Obama dumped on the public option at almost every opportunity, calling it just a "sliver" of the overall package, and not the most important sliver at that.

After all, Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, was huddling regularly with Max Baucus when the Montana Senator squashed the public option the first time.

And after all, Obama didn't even ask Lieberman to back the public option.

Seems to me that Obama played us all for fools.

His discussion of the public option was a cynical charade from the start, and now he expects all good progressives to rally around this "historic" health care bill?

Forget about it.

The most historic thing about Obama's health care bill is the double-cross he dealt progressives.
Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine.

© 2009 The Progressive

[bte]

I really don't have a problem with the healthcare bill as a whole. I do have a problem with government forcing people to buy the coverage.

[buckjohnson]

The health care bill, while not perfect, is at least bringing america into the 21st century. And bte, the mandate is about personal responsibilty, which I have no trouble with.

[hippifried]

What a bunch of crap. There was no doublecross. Obama has never claimed to be "a progressive". He doesn't run the Congress. He doesn't even have a vote in the Congress. This is politics. You take what you can get. We've been waiting around for over a century to get something on the books to work with. Now we have whiners from all over fringes wanting to scrap it & start all over? They think the President should have vetoed the bill, after all it took just to get this piddly startup, just because they set their expectations too high & got disappointed? I don't think so.

The so called "progressives" do not run this country. If they want more clout, then they should stop sniveling & get to work getting people who agree with them for the most part elected. It's not that hard if you have good ideas. All you have to do is convince the public you're right. Yeah, good luck with that if you can't stop crying when you don't get your way.

[trish]

I have a great deal of sympathy with progressives, but I'm also a realist. I would have loved a single payer national health plan; but it's pretty fucking clear we're lucky to have any sort of universal plan. I voted for Obama, and no I don't feel like a chump. Obama is exactly as advertised, a pragmatic Illinois democrat who's not too principled to negotiate, compromise and deal to get the job done. Obama never said he was a progressive, or a socialist ... if you got that idea you weren't listening to Obama, you were listening to Fox InfoNewTainment.

[hippifried]

As far as I'm concerned, the way to go on healthcare would have been to expand Medicare. Double the contributions. Then just get rid of the age restriction. No more employer based insurance. No more medicade. No more whining about poor people running up huge bills at the ER because that's the only place they can see a doctor. On & on... Oh well. At least there's something on the books now to work with & tweak till it turns into something that actually works. It's taken almost 50 years just to get Medicare to what it is today. There's really somebody who thinks they could have gotten the perfect universal coverage in a year?

Who are all these so called "progressive" pundits crawling out of the woodwork? They sound just like the teabaggers. If I didn't know better, I'd swear they were whoring for the Republicans. Do I really know better, or am I just hoping?

[Silcc69]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36087653/ns/health-health_care

[NYBURBS]

And bte, the mandate is about personal responsibilty, which I have no trouble with.

If you wanted personal responsibility then all that needed to be done was to say that you have to have insurance or the money up front for medical care. That would be incentive to keep medical insurance and/or live a healthier lifestyle. An additional change could have been allowing inter-state competition in the insurance market.

However, mandating that you purchase a private commodity is not ensuring responsibility, but rather is an attempt at curtailing individual choice and freedom (the antithesis of personal responsibility).

[hippifried]

If you wanted personal responsibility then all that needed to be done was to say that you have to have insurance or the money up front for medical care. That would be incentive to keep medical insurance and/or live a healthier lifestyle. An additional change could have been allowing inter-state competition in the insurance market.


Well it probably took a lot more than necessary in the way of "whereas" & "heretofore", but that's exactly what the bill does.

That said: I don't like mandatory insurance either. Not one little bit. I don't like any kind of mandatory private insurance. I know it's a longshot, but I really hope the SCOTUS pulls that part of the bill. That would force the public option. We have 3+ years to fix this. Of course that could very well come back to bite the States in the ass with their own mandatory insurance silliness, but that'd be fine with me too. I don't think the insurance industry should be protected in any way, & they certainly shouldn't be the "be all & end all" of medical care.

As far as I'm concerned, basic medical care should be built into the national infrastructure as part of the mandate to promote the general welfare. We'd save a boatload of cash if we just get the "uninsured" out of the ER & into the local clinic. That's currently the biggest drain on Medicaid. Prevention is a lot cheaper than disease maintenence, & you can't do that unless you get people in to get regular checkups as a matter of habit. Etc etc etc... There's no good reason to keep blowing this off.

[NYBURBS]

Well it probably took a lot more than necessary in the way of "whereas" & "heretofore", but that's exactly what the bill does.


Well, first off I begin with the disclaimer that no one really knows what this bill does lol. I downloaded the whole thing one night and almost fell off my fucking chair at the mess that opened up in my PDF reader.

With that said, afaik it doesn't repeal the requirement that hospitals treat you even if you don't have insurance. That is what I was pointing to when I said "if you want personal responsibility."

It's not that I want to see people with no medical insurance turned away or to suffer, but this whole process is just one more step in the direction of statism. Requiring that you live your life for the state and the collective, and that your decisions must be made with the good of the collective in mind. I have a moral issue with that and there is no getting around it for me. Bad bill, bad policy.

[hippifried]

Not buying it. All bills look convoluted in their raw form, & any law is a nightmare to read. They're full of caveats, definitions, & redundancies in every section. The raw bill has all the redactions listed separately. We know what it does in theory. Like any new law, we won't know how everything shakes for several years. But there's no excuse for anybody not knowing what's in it by now.

You can't repeal the emergency treat all requirement. It hasn't been all that long since people were literally dying in ambulances because hospitals were turning away those who couldn't prove ability to pay. We're not going back to the bad old days. It wasn't that well thought out, but there's no taking it back & nobody can really define "emergency". Medicaid ends up picking up the tab in the long run. ER service is the highest cost care there is, & it would be cheaper for the taxpayer to put a clinic on every corner.

Not buying the Ayn Rand stuff either. Your dilemma is not "moral". It's ideological. There's a difference. We all live in the society. Everybody benefits from the collective infrastructure, even egoists. (I refuse to acknowlege the egoist co-option of the word "objective") This isn't the utopian paradise of John Galt. Nothing is that simplistic. Morality is universal & based on reciprosity. Everything else is arbitrary. If anybody really wants to be the rugged individual, I'm sure there's still a few unused caves around. Everything we do as a society is collective. The State itself is collective. Capitalism & markets don't solve all problems. The trick is finding the right mix.

[NYBURBS]

Not buying it. All bills look convoluted in their raw form, & any law is a nightmare to read. They're full of caveats, definitions, & redundancies in every section. The raw bill has all the redactions listed separately. We know what it does in theory. Like any new law, we won't know how everything shakes for several years. But there's no excuse for anybody not knowing what's in it by now.

Ah have you actually read this bill? You actually need the entire US Code in front of you to know exactly what it is amending. I'll give you an example:

(b) Title VIII- Section 807 of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. 296e-1) is amended--
(1) in subsection (a)--
(A) by striking the subsection heading and inserting ‘Cultural Competency, Prevention, and Public Health and Individuals With Disability Grants’; and (B) by striking ‘for the purpose of’ and all that follows through ‘health care.’ and inserting ‘for the development, evaluation, and dissemination of research, demonstration projects, and model curricula for cultural competency, prevention, public health proficiency, reducing health disparities, and aptitude for working with individuals with disabilities training for use in health professions schools and continuing education programs, and for other purposes determined as appropriate by the Secretary.’; and
(2) by redesignating subsection (b) as subsection (d); (3) by inserting after subsection (a) the following:

Yea now tell me you know what 2000+ pages of that actually says without the entire US Code in front of you. If you had a team of lawyers researching it 24/7 you still wouldn't know what is in it by now.

[NYBURBS]

You can't repeal the emergency treat all requirement. It hasn't been all that long since people were literally dying in ambulances because hospitals were turning away those who couldn't prove ability to pay. We're not going back to the bad old days. It wasn't that well thought out, but there's no taking it back & nobody can really define "emergency". Medicaid ends up picking up the tab in the long run. ER service is the highest cost care there is, & it would be cheaper for the taxpayer to put a clinic on every corner.

I'm pointing out that these cries of "personal responsibility" are a mere smoke screen. If people wanted true personal responsibility then they would simply say make sure you have insurance or else you had better find a charitable hospital/clinic. Requiring the purchase of a product via the threat of incarceration (which is what imposing a tax is at the end of the day) is not "personal responsibility."



Not buying the Ayn Rand stuff either. Your dilemma is not "moral". It's ideological. There's a difference. We all live in the society. Everybody benefits from the collective infrastructure, even egoists.

Actually it most certainly is moral. If we re-instituted the draft it would at its heart be a moral question. If we re-instituted slavery you would deem that a moral dilemma, not an ideological one. Anytime you traverse into the realm of removing the rights of individuals in favor of the "collective will", you move into moral questions, and no amount of spin can change that. Just because something has transcended into the legal realm does not strip it of its moral implication(s). The moral question here is the same that has been presented for ages, and that is the question of who owns your life and your choices. Do you own them or does 51% of the population own them?

[hippifried]

Yea now tell me you know what 2000+ pages of that actually says without the entire US Code in front of you. If you had a team of lawyers researching it 24/7 you still wouldn't know what is in it by now. They all look like that. Any piece of legislation, at any level, ends up changing some other overlapping previous piece of legislation. Every single change has to be listed in the new law, & addendums made to post on existing laws. That's a minimum 3/4 of every single law that gets passed. That's what that big stack of paper is that all the whiners keep waving around like they've never seen anything like it. You just posted a little piece of it. Don't try to get cute. I didn't just get off the boat. Try reading the actual law.


If people wanted true personal responsibility then they would simply say make sure you have insurance or else you had better find a charitable hospital/clinic. Requiring the purchase of a product via the threat of incarceration (which is what imposing a tax is at the end of the day) is not "personal responsibility."I'm trying to decide whether that's immoral or amoral. Either way it's an extreme point of view. (Probably why the egoist cult can't gain any traction.) Personal resposibility is not telling everybody else to go to hell. A tax is not an incarceration by any stretch of the imagination. Personally, I don't get all misty eyed over buzz word chants like "personal responsibility" or "family values", or any of the other BS. Nor am I impressed by any rigid ideologies. It might as well all be theology, & I just don['t care what the book or the dead prophet says. Real problems happen in the here & now, & need to be dealt with on a pragmatic basis. Ideologues just get in the way.




Actually it most certainly is moral. If we re-instituted the draft it would at its heart be a moral question. If we re-instituted slavery you would deem that a moral dilemma, not an ideological one. Anytime you traverse into the realm of removing the rights of individuals in favor of the "collective will", you move into moral questions, and no amount of spin can change that. Just because something has transcended into the legal realm does not strip it of its moral implication(s). The moral question here is the same that has been presented for ages, and that is the question of who owns your life and your choices. Do you own them or does 51% of the population own them?
No no no. Nobody's rights are being removed. Rights can't be removed in the first place. This isn't slavery, indenturement, or involuntary servitude. This isn't about ownership of anything, & nobody's taking your life. There's no such thing as a right to shirk one's social responibilities. You live in the society. You benefit from the social infrastructure. Nobody's twisting your arm to stay. Try Somalia. They don't have a government to interfere with your "rights".

Morality is about reciprocity. It's our conscience. Personally, I think it's innate. The principle of reciprosity, the universal code of human interaction (the code), AKA the golden rule, is the basis for all morality & ethics. If you can't tie it directly to that, then it's something arbitrary & not a moral issue at all. Your dilemma is based on a clash of political 'isms. The Good Samaritan didn't help the mugging victim because some rule book told him to. Everybody else was reading the same book & they were stepping over the guy & moving on. He stopped because he knew that if he'd been the victim he'd want somebody to stop & help. Reciprocity is ideologically, politically, & culturally neutral.

This healthcare bill knda sucks, but it wasn't going get any better this time around. It's a woefully meager first stepm, but some Chinese guy said "The longest journey starts with a single step.", or something like that. Sooner or later, we're going to make sure that everybody has unrestricted access to medical care because it's the right thing to do. It's the right thing to do because it saves everybody money. It's the right thing to do because everybody can access the help they need. It's the right thing to do. I don't see why there needs to be a better reason than that. The politics & economic theology be damned.

[NYBURBS]

They all look like that. Any piece of legislation, at any level, ends up changing some other overlapping previous piece of legislation.

On the federal level they do tend to look like that, but not all the States write their legislation in such a convoluted manner. There are less ambigious ways of detailing what you are changing. Here is an example of how it is done in NY:

AN ACT to amend the penal law, in relation to vandalism and theft in
connection with places of worship

THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK, REPRESENTED IN SENATE AND ASSEM-
BLY, DO ENACT AS FOLLOWS:

1 Section 1. Subdivision 9 of section 155.30 of the penal law, as added
2 by chapter 450 of the laws of 1990, is amended to read as follows:
3 9. The property consists of a scroll, religious vestment, vessel or
4 other item of property having a value of at least one hundred dollars
5 kept for or used in connection with religious worship in any building or
6 structure used as a place of religious worship by a religious corpo-
7 ration, as incorporated under the religious corporations law or the
8 education law. THIS SUBDIVISION SHALL ALSO APPLY IF ANY OF THE AFORESAID
9 PROPERTY INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, STATUES, MENORAHS AND NATIVITY
10 SCENES IS LOCATED OUTSIDE AND WITHIN ONE HUNDRED FEET OF THE BUILDING OR
11 STRUCTURE OF WORSHIP ON THE PROPERTY OF THE RELIGIOUS CORPORATION.
12 S 2. The opening paragraph of section 240.71 of the penal law, as
13 added by chapter 635 of the laws of 1999, is amended to read as follows:
14 1. A person is guilty of criminal interference with health care
15 services or religious worship in the first degree when he or she commits
16 the crime of criminal interference with health care services or reli-
17 gious worship in the second degree and has been previously convicted of

EXPLANATION--Matter in ITALICS (underscored) is new; matter in brackets
[ ] is old law to be omitted.
LBD01101-09-9
A. 180--A 2

1 the crime of criminal interference with health care services or reli-
2 gious worship in the first or second degree[.] RESPECTIVELY; OR
3 2. A PERSON IS GUILTY OF CRIMINAL INTERFERENCE WITH RELIGIOUS WORSHIP
4 IN THE FIRST DEGREE WHEN HE OR SHE COMMITS CRIMINAL INTERFERENCE WITH
5 RELIGIOUS WORSHIP IN THE SECOND DEGREE AND HE OR SHE INTENTIONALLY
6 DAMAGES PROPERTY OF A PLACE OF WORSHIP IN AN AMOUNT EXCEEDING ONE
7 HUNDRED FIFTY DOLLARS.
8 S 3. This act shall take effect on the first of November next succeed-
9 ing the date on which it shall have become a law.

As you can see, it states the entire text of the piece which is being amended, and differentiates them from the portions being redacted. Unlike the federal bill which requires you to sort through the code to see what is already written there.

[NYBURBS]

I'm trying to decide whether that's immoral or amoral. Either way it's an extreme point of view.

You can characterize it as you see fit, but it would actually be "personal responsibility" (since that seems the buzz word for those insisting on a mandate).



No no no. Nobody's rights are being removed. Rights can't be removed in the first place.

When you tell someone that they must purchase something, merely because they exist, then yes you are removing someone's rights.



This isn't slavery, indenturement, or involuntary servitude. This isn't about ownership of anything, & nobody's taking your life. There's no such thing as a right to shirk one's social responibilities.

You owe a duty not to hurt others or violate their rights, you do not owe to anyone anything beyond that. That is where your view becomes immoral because you are asserting that another person must produce not for their own well being, but for the well being of someone else. I'm all for charity, but mandating something via the law is not charity. It is sanctioning government sponsored violence against someone if they refuse to comply (aka don't pay your taxes and men with guns come).



You live in the society. You benefit from the social infrastructure. Nobody's twisting your arm to stay. Try Somalia. They don't have a government to interfere with your "rights".

Individuals make up society, not the other way around.




Morality is about reciprocity. It's our conscience. Personally, I think it's innate. The principle of reciprosity, the universal code of human interaction (the code), AKA the golden rule, is the basis for all morality & ethics. If you can't tie it directly to that, then it's something arbitrary & not a moral issue at all.

I actually do treat others as I'd expect to be treated, and I don't need a law for that. Our definitions of a moral society is where we differ. I see a moral society as one that protects people's rights to their own life, their own property, and their own choices (so long as those choices do not trample on another person's rights). You apparently see it as a place that directs that you sacrifice yourself for the well being of the collective good (and history is filled with atrocities based off of such viewpoints). Btw Somalia is completely lawless, meaning that people harm one another without legal penalty. Obviously that is not what I am advocating for here.


Sooner or later, we're going to make sure that everybody has unrestricted access to medical care because it's the right thing to do.

So you're going to tell people that they can only practice medicine if they consent to taking a monetary payment set by the government? This was tried a few places already, like mid-20th century Eastern Europe, and it didn't work out so well. I'll let you get back to basking in the Glory of the State now.

[Cuchulain]

You apparently see it as a place that directs that you sacrifice yourself for the well being of the collective good

Ah, Comrade BURBS, still a faithful follower of that old hatchet-faced bitch Ayn Rand. Good to see some things never change, I guess. Btw, know anyplace I can get a life-size cutout of her? I wanna use it for target practice.

C'mon, we all know the bill sucks, but it's the best we were gonna get from a bunch of obstructionist rethugnicans and wimpy middle-of-the-road Dems. I'd have preferred a simple, Single Payer system like Medicare for all that would end up being cheaper for most of us. It would have been better for ppl and better for business.

Right now, we're not sacrificing ourselves for the collective good. We're sacrificing ourselves for health insurance company profits. Which would you call a more moral sacrifice? Regardless of what think tank CONs or John BONER says, it just ain't moral for companies to make cash by denying care to people who need it - or for someone to lose their home and lifetime savings because they get sick. The CON bullshit about "well, if you just take care of yourself, you won't get sick" just doesn't wash. Our air, water and food is filled with crap, by-products of our industrial, profit-uber-alles society, that can make even the most careful person deathly ill.

I'm getting out of the rat race when I hit 62. I'm gonna sleep late, lift weights that are too heavy for an old geezer and drink too much beer. If I have enough hours banked, my union insurance will carry me for a year. Then I can self pay for another year and a half (God knows what the cost will be by then). What am I and millions of others like me supposed to do until Medicare kicks in at 65? At least the Obama bill will give me a chance to buy coverage. Your 60's is not a smart time to be without insurance. What about those who lose coverage when work is dead slow, like now? Remember that old sci-fi saying about 'the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few'?

Hope you're doing well, btw. Live long and prosper.

[trish]

You owe a duty not to hurt others or violate their rights, you do not owe to anyone anything beyond that. You owe it to others to see that the philosophical, ethical, moral or political positions you adopt, in their practice, treat people equitably, respectfully and humanely. There is no minimal ethics which if followed absolves you of all responsibility to your fellow-kind.

[NYBURBS]

Hope you're doing well, btw. Live long and prosper.

You too bro, enjoy the retirement :rock2

[hippifried]

On the federal level they do tend to look like that, but not all the States write their legislation in such a convoluted manner. There are less ambigious ways of detailing what you are changing. Here is an example of how it is done in NY:So... You want to add another 1000 ppg or more because you & others don't want to look it up to know what y'all're complaining about or whether or not you should be complaining in the first place? I'm unsympathetic. Just skip over the technical asides & read the actual text of fthe new law.




You can characterize it as you see fit, but it would actually be "personal responsibility" (since that seems the buzz word for those insisting on a mandate). Every tax is a mandate. Society isn't a freeloader's paradise. There's responsibilities that come with the benefits. We don't use a shunning system & we don't just toss people out the cave anymore. But social resposibility didn't cease to exist just because we separated the cave into individual sleeping quarters. Nothing's changed just because the population's grown. We're still social critters. Society still exists so we can pool our resources to make life safer & easier for all. Otherwise what's the point?




When you tell someone that they must purchase something, merely because they exist, then yes you are removing someone's rights.Wrong. It's a burdon, but there's always a burdon involved in adding a social benefit. This one isn't well thought out, & I freely admit that, but there's no removal of rights. If I had my druthers, the insurance industry wouldn't even have been a consideration in all this. They don't deliver medical care. They're just money changers. I see no reason that a vital social service should depend on hedge bets. We have over 3 years to fix this flaw in the law before it takes effect.




You owe a duty not to hurt others or violate their rights, you do not owe to anyone anything beyond that. That is where your view becomes immoral because you are asserting that another person must produce not for their own well being, but for the well being of someone else. I'm all for charity, but mandating something via the law is not charity. It is sanctioning government sponsored violence against someone if they refuse to comply (aka don't pay your taxes and men with guns come). You're promoting irresponsibility. This is where the egoist ideology falls flat. (well... flatter) Without the collective society, you have nothing. You own nothing. You produce nothing. You just get eaten by the first predator that crosses you path. Without the collective society, we don't even survive as a species. Nobody accomplishes anything all by themselves. Everyone ows a social debt. It's in your own self interest to promote collective social betterment & chip in. Your own well being is enhanced by, if not dependent on, the well being of others. When everybody chips in via taxes, as opposed to charitable giving, costs go down by virtue of the size of the pool. Compulsory contribution may not be pleasant, but it remains necessary as long as there are those who believe they owe no social debt. So basically, the egoist ideologues are just cutting their collective nose off to spite their collective face. Don't kid yourself. Ayn Rand didn't pull her ideas out of her ass, & y'all're why we hace taxes in the first place. If you refuse to pay, there's no violence unless you initiate it. Society just reposesses what you've been borrowing, & auctions it off to those who aren't stick-in-the-mud ideologues bent on stifling social progress.




Individuals make up society, not the other way around.Don't misunderstand me. I have no problem with individuality. I don't want to stifle it. I recognize its importance & benefit. I recognize & promote my own individuality. I don't want to turn humanity into a herd. But society isn't the sum of its parts. It's exponential.





I actually do treat others as I'd expect to be treated, and I don't need a law for that. Our definitions of a moral society is where we differ. I see a moral society as one that protects people's rights to their own life, their own property, and their own choices (so long as those choices do not trample on another person's rights). You apparently see it as a place that directs that you sacrifice yourself for the well being of the collective good (and history is filled with atrocities based off of such viewpoints). Btw Somalia is completely lawless, meaning that people harm one another without legal penalty. Obviously that is not what I am advocating for here.Well god for you. You're human after all. Since the code is universally understood, there's never been laws needed except for the fact that there are those who violate it anyway. Sacrafice is your term, & there's no need for the negative connotation in regards to helping those around you. You give in order to receive. Reciprocity. The real difference between us is that you don't trust people to follow the code, even though most people do most of the time without even thinking about it. I think we dwell too much on "ownership". In the grand scheme of things, that's really a recent concept that grew from power & artificial economic valuations. It was unknown in the precolumbian new world, yet vast & fabulous civilizations still came & went. I'm an American. I understand ownership. I just don't buy the need to think of everything in those terms. I also don't buy the meme that ownership is what drives creativity & the willingness to risk. Every island in the Pacific (sans the Galapagos maybe) was discovered by people who had no concept of ownership. They weren't automatons. Individuals one & all. We all have differences of perception. It's not right or wrong. There's no one size fits all. If someone wants to guage their happiness by property, that's fine, but they shouldn't expect the same value system from everybody else. BTW: Nice to see that you acknowlege the need for state control. Now it seems that we're just talking about degrees & maybe some personal priorities.




So you're going to tell people that they can only practice medicine if they consent to taking a monetary payment set by the government? This was tried a few places already, like mid-20th century Eastern Europe, and it didn't work out so well. I'll let you get back to basking in the Glory of the State now.
They do that now. Medicare alone pays for 40% or more of the medical "market". I'm not sure what the %age is of all the rest of the various programs. What's the difference if it's the government setting the payment schedule or an insurance bureaucracy? Don't try to make lame comparisons with post war Soviet block craziness. There's no other country in the civilized world that doesn't provide universal medical care, & nobody's having a problem with it. Am I worried about the comfort level of doctors? Nope. Somalia's open to them too.

I don't care about the glory of the state or anything else. Ideologically, I'm an anarchist. But I'm also a realistic pragmatist. The current state system is just a larger version of the tribal system. Our democratic republic is a step up from feudalism. Again, the difference between us is that I'm optimistic. Things are getting better.

[onmyknees]

"When everybody chips in via taxes, as opposed to charitable giving, costs go down by virtue of the size of the pool. "


some interesting things were said in the ensuing discussion, but this might be the most interesting. I'm not sure where that line, or thought process came from. It certainly didn't come from Madison or Jefferson ! It sounds like you're making a correlation between what insurance companies do in terms of spreading the risk around or pooling, and the US Treasury collecting taxes. That may be true in terms of auto, flood and health insurance, but how do you relate that death tax, or double taxing capitol gains ?
If your premise is that the collection of income taxes benefits society as a whole, you'll get no argument from me. My issue is one that we must face as a nation is ....when do all forms of taxation and fees stop being ones "Patriotic Duty" as Joe Biden would say...and start becoming confiscatory? I'd say we're treading dangerously close to that line.
There's a balance somewhere between John Keynes and Adam Smith . Obviously my belief tends to be closer to Smith.... we've had that balance during certain periods in our history, but are far from it at the moment.

[hippifried]

Kneepads,

All taxes are confiscatory. That's why we call them taxes instead of donations. It doesn't matter whether the duty is considered familial, tribal, nationally patriotic, global, or even some horrible affront to individual freedom, the duty is there. How you approach it or whether it bothers you or not is just a personal mindset.

Societies exist so members can pool resources. We currently have a monetary system, so that's what we use. Whether money exists or not has never gotten in the way of people accomplishing things, & nothing of note gets accomplished without the society.

As far as I'm concerned, capitalism is just a form of privatized socialism, which is nothing more than pooling resources. It has its place in our monetary system & gets some things accomplished, but it's limited in scope & just one short step from feudalism. Marx saw it as a modern continuation of feudalism. He was right to an extent, but he was a crackpot with no workable solution. I refuse to use his writings as definitive of the terminology. Who should be the tyrant has never been the point of liberation.

You're right. My thought process doesn't come from Madison or Jefferson, in toto. Although they had vast differences of opinion, they both had some good ideas. But no ideas are perfect, & there's always room for revision & improvemnt. There's always room for new & different ideas too. Nobody pulls ideas out of their ass. They're all built from earlier thought, passed down through lore, writing, & argument.

The term "death tax" is just an ad hominem misnomer for the luxury tax on inheritance. Capital gains are taxed at about a third of the rate of every other type of income, so even if the mythical double bump was real, it still wouldn't come up to a standard tax rate. Seems a little regressive to me since the more money you have, the more likely it is to be capital gains. Since everybody gains from the general infrastructure, & consumer spending accounts for over 70% of the total economy, it just doesn't seem all that smart to shift the tax burden down the economic ladder.

As for general modern economics: I see it all as memetic theology with Adam Smith as the demigod & John Maynard Keynes as the messianic prophet, who is both deified & demonized. The church of monetary philosophy has fractured into 2 major denominations; Keynesians & anti-Keynesians. It reminds me of Catholics & Protestants or Shia & Sunni. Personally, I'm agnostic (or maybe Darwinian) on this topic. Like I said, there's no such thing as a perfect idea. I'm not all that convinced that Smith really knew what he was talking about or understood economics outside the gold based monetary system that was his only model. As far as I'm concerned, we need a total rethink on what we think we know & our faith in what we've been taught.

[q1a2z3]

obama has proven that OJT does not work in the oval office. Being a community agitator does not prepare you to cultivate a country - in fact it's just the opposite. It will be fun to watch his "change" get reversed - hopefully starting in November. Just another incompetent black man - just like ray ( I can't use those school buses) nagin.

[trish]

q1a2z3... just another incompetent, mentally deficient RACIST troll.

[Cuchulain]

obama has proven that OJT does not work in the oval office. Being a community agitator does not prepare you to cultivate a country - in fact it's just the opposite. It will be fun to watch his "change" get reversed - hopefully starting in November. Just another incompetent black man - just like ray ( I can't use those school buses) nagin.

:screwy :fu: