Democrats versus Republicans

[ssneade]

This is one of my favorites. From Alexander Tyler. No, he wasn't writing about the United States. This quote is well over one hundred years old. Tyler was writing about the fall of the Athenian Republic.


"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage."

[ssneade]

"The main plank in the National Socialist program is to abolish the liberalistic concept of the individual and the Marxist concept of humanity and to substitute for them the folk community, rooted in the soil and bound together by the bond of its common blood." [Adolph Hitler, quoted in Hitler, A Study in Tyranny, by Alan Bullock (Harper Collins, NY)]

you foolish, foolish libs.

[sailaway21]

Originally Posted by jackdale

I taught Grade 12 using a mandated curriculum ......

That might explain your apparent view that much of politics is comprised of settled issues and your unwillingness to re-examine pre-conceived ideas. For not being a liberal, much of your posting seems to be in lock step with that orthodoxy, particularly the open mindedness on everything but that orthodoxy. One can thus understand the unwillingness to confront the concept of liberal fascism; it's only fascism when the "right" does it, correct?

We do appreciate the unblemished view from the 1960's though. It's rare to encounter it these days unaltered by events subsequent.

[wind_magic]

Health care

One thing that strikes me about the new health care bill is that if you assume a conservative 200$us/month health care bill for the average poor person and add in 100$us/month in food stamps, that gets you to about 300k$us/month or 3.6k$us/year in benefits. For a working poor person to have a retirement income of 3.6k$us/year would mean that they need to save up 120k$us at a 3% interest rate, or approximately 10% of a 30k/year salary for about 20 years, assuming the rest goes towards the cost of working (vehicle, gasoline, etc).

That begs the question, if the government is going to give you free health care and 100$us/month in food stamps for doing absolutely nothing, and you are a poor person who only makes 30k$us/year, why bother working at all ? Assuming you have a roof over your head, you're no better off in retirement if you make 30k$us/year (without the new health care bill) than you would be if you just quit your job today and sit in the park and feed pigeons (with the new health care bill).

I'm all about people having affordable health care, but at some point it seems like you are creating incentives for people to sit on their butt doing nothing all day.

[sailaway21]

Originally Posted by wind_magic

Health care

One thing that strikes me about the new health care bill is that if you assume a conservative 200$us/month health care bill for the average poor person and add in 100$us/month in food stamps, that gets you to about 300k$us/month or 3.6k$us/year in benefits. For a working poor person to have a retirement income of 3.6k$us/year would mean that they need to save up 120k$us at a 3% interest rate, or approximately 10% of a 30k/year salary for about 20 years, assuming the rest goes towards the cost of working (vehicle, gasoline, etc).

That begs the question, if the government is going to give you free health care and 100$us/month in food stamps for doing absolutely nothing, and you are a poor person who only makes 30k$us/year, why bother working at all ? Assuming you have a roof over your head, you're no better off in retirement if you make 30k$us/year (without the new health care bill) than you would be if you just quit your job today and sit in the park and feed pigeons (with the new health care bill).

I'm all about people having affordable health care, but at some point it seems like you are creating incentives for people to sit on their butt doing nothing all day.

Windy...you're well on the way towards explaining the low-growth, high-unemployment society that is Europe. It's of course interesting that we should elect to emulate such policies just as the Europeans are confronting the fact that their birth rate is going to make the maintenance of such polices questionable. Immigration is touted as a possible solution but not one without it's own issues; there is no equivalent tradition of assimilation within Europe to that of the US. And the latest evidence from Canada, which faces similar issues, is that immigration will not be the answer.
Canada's big problem -- too few babies

Demographics, an historically boring exercise in statistics, is likely to be the science of new found respect in the next half century. For instance, we've spent some thirty years worrying about having our lunch handed to us by the Japanese. Reading the following article, one might question as to why this is an economy were worried about other than it's disappearing. Gross: Why Japan's Economy Won't Grow | Newsweek Voices - Daniel Gross | Newsweek.com

I'm hardly against emulating other country's successes, but we seem to be focused on emulating their failures instead.

It might not hurt for someone, anyone, to state that there is no health care crisis. There is a concern about the health care system and it's funding but there is not the implied lack of health care. We face a battle that is far more likely to devastate our economic dynamism than it is to effectively reform health care as we know it.

[sck5]

" ... high-unemployment society that is Europe"

you really should check your facts before making claims;

Europe Unemployment Rate Rises to Highest Since 1999 (Update2) - Bloomberg.com

(highest in a decade is still lower than ours)

But I agree that we may not "effectively reform health care". That is because the Republican party is apparently a fully owned subsidiary of the insurance industry and is determined to block any change whatsoever.

YOU may not have a health care crisis but the 60 million who have no coverage do. The people who think they have coverage until they start to need it and are tossed aside by the insurance company sure do have a crisis. And paying twice as much (yes, literally twice as much) as the Europeans for health care that isnt as good is a really stupid thing to insist on. (Unless you are an insurance company stockholder).

Please dont tell me the nonsense about waiting in lines, as if nobody in the US ever waits for an appointment or has to wait in an emergency room. Also, please spare me the comparisons with the UK which has a system nobody wants to copy. There IS a better way than what we have now, which is why we rank at the same level as Costa Rica in world health care comparisons.

Costa Rica!! That is the level that republicans think we should stay at. How brainwashed can they be? They actually think it is a good thing to pay more than the Canadians do for the EXACT SAME PILLS.

Here is what the Repubs are REALLY afraid of - The American public actually WANTS health care reform and if the Dems give it to them the Republicans will be stuck running for dog catcher for decades. Much better to try to block it or make it so unworkable it fails. Isnt republican political victory more important than health care?

[sailaway21]

Instead of checking "snap-shots" sck5 might have checked some facts himself.

Anybody attempting to explain the evolution of unemployment in

Europe over the last 30 years must confront the following set of facts: First, high unemployment is not a European trait. Until the end of the 1960s, unemployment was very low in Europe and the talk then was of the "European unemployment miracle." The miracle came to an end in the 1970s, when unemployment steadily increased. It kept increasing in the 1980s. It appeared to turn around in the mid-1990s, but the decline is (temporarily?) on hold. For the European Union as a whole, the current unemployment rate is still very high, around 8 percent.

Second, the evolution of the average European unemployment rate hides large cross-country differences. In the four large continental countries -- France, Germany, Spain, and Italy -- the unemployment rate has increased steadily and remains very high, around 10 percent. (The Spanish unemployment rate has been cut in half since its peak, but remains above 10 percent.) In a number of smaller countries, notably Ireland and the Netherlands, unemployment increased until the early 1980s, but has steadily decreased since then. Unemployment is less than 5 percent in both countries today. In a number of other countries, notably Sweden and Denmark, unemployment has remained consistently low -- except for a bout of high cyclical unemployment at the start of the 1990s. Unemployment is below 5 percent in both countries today.

Third, at a given unemployment rate, individual unemployment duration is substantially longer, and flows in and out of unemployment substantially lower, in Europe than in the United States.(2) And, the increase in European unemployment reflects an increase in duration rather than an increase in flows. As a result, duration is high. In Germany and Italy for example, more than half of the unemployed today have been unemployed for more than one year.

Finally, if one takes the change in inflation as a rough indicator of whether the rate of unemployment is above or below the natural rate, one must conclude that, apart from cyclical movements in the early 1980s and early 1990s, the broad movements in the unemployment rate have reflected movements in the natural rate of unemployment. In particular, over the last few years, inflation has declined only slightly, suggesting that the natural rate today is lower than, but close to, the actual unemployment rate.
Explaining European Unemployment
and that's from 2004...before the current recession.

You can read an overview of the sluggish economic growth here:
Economy of the European Union - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Unfortunately your meanderings on health care are no more apt than your notions about the vitality of the European economy over the last quarter century.

[wind_magic]

Sck5, I want health care reform too. My only point was that even the poorest people should be contributing something to pay for it, even if it is just 1$us, because when you give things away for nothing you create a disincentive to work, and let's face it ... in the end it isn't that much different than an anthill, and the ants do have to keep working. No matter what your personal philosophy, no matter how you rotate and bend the numbers, large numbers of ants have to keep working.

[ssneade]

health insurance as seen today is NOT insurance. it's a freakin health maintenance plan.

when your house needs painting, do you file a claim against your homeowners policy? no, you paint your damn house.

when your tires wear out on your vehicle, do you call your insurance company and tell them you need new tires? no, ya go buy some damn tires.

i'm sure there are plenty of up and coming companies that are starting to do extended warranties that would be more than glad to take your money. insurance is for catastrophic events that could potentially put you in financial ruin.

but now we have to see a doctor or go to the emergency room every time we have a sniffle or a scratchy throat. i'm callin b.s. the government has slowly over the years brainwashed us into thinking everything is a crisis and you need to go get checked out.

and god help if we had to endure a cold for more than a few days. we've put ourselves into a comfort zone we are scared to death to get out of.

when i was young, yeah that phrase again, we didn't have health insurance. doctors made house calls, and we didn't need a pill for every little thing that weren't perfect in our lives. and guess what? i survived in spite of those deficiencies. is there really that much more sickness in the world today? naw, what we have is a sick government and a spoiled rotten society.

you want cheap health insurance? get a policy with a ten thousand dollar deductible. it's that simple................

[aeronautic1]

Q: How many Kennedys does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: Three - One to hold the lightbulb and two to get drunk enough to get the room spinning.