(Un) Affordable Care Act - the Uncomfortable Truth

[DSpencer]

Re: (Un) Affordable Care Act - the Uncomfortable Truth

How do you realistically limit the amount of money a politician can earn after leaving office? Let alone his friends and family? "Sorry Joe, your uncle was a congressman so you can only make $40,000 a year for the rest of your life".

The money follows the power. Politicians have the power to regulate everything and therefore pick winners and losers in the economy. It's only natural that the winners would reward them for picking them. The real solution has to be limiting power. But I don't know how that part happens, especially when roughly half the population disagrees it even should happen.

[Woodsman]

Re: (Un) Affordable Care Act - the Uncomfortable Truth

How do you realistically limit the amount of money a politician can earn after leaving office? Let alone his friends and family? "Sorry Joe, your uncle was a congressman so you can only make $40,000 a year for the rest of your life".

The money follows the power. Politicians have the power to regulate everything and therefore pick winners and losers in the economy. It's only natural that the winners would reward them for picking them. The real solution has to be limiting power. But I don't know how that part happens, especially when roughly half the population disagrees it even should happen.

Limiting power, spending, terms, and post-service lobbying would go a long way, no? There's no magic bullet, but's what stopping us from passing laws prohibiting lobbying by retired pols and fed employees?

[vt]

Re: (Un) Affordable Care Act - the Uncomfortable Truth

Why just limit lobbying; get rid of it. No more bought politicians. I coined the term plotiticians because all the do is plot how to denigrate the opposition, mostly with lies.

Publicly fund political campaigns with limited but reasonable dollars. This would get rid of almost all negative campaigning and better stick to the issues.

[Woodsman]

Re: (Un) Affordable Care Act - the Uncomfortable Truth

Why just limit lobbying; get rid of it. No more bought politicians. I coined the term plotiticians because all the do is plot how to denigrate the opposition, mostly with lies.

Publicly fund political campaigns with limited but reasonable dollars. This would get rid of almost all negative campaigning and better stick to the issues.

All for it. What about a 100% publicly financed election system. No private money in our politics, period.

[DSpencer]

Re: (Un) Affordable Care Act - the Uncomfortable Truth

Limiting power, spending, terms, and post-service lobbying would go a long way, no? There's no magic bullet, but's what stopping us from passing laws prohibiting lobbying by retired pols and fed employees?

Yes that would help. My point was just that these laws would have to be passed by the crooked politicians themselves which seems unlikely. I suppose the root of the problem is that voters aren't educated, not many honest people run for office, and it's sometimes hard to tell who is honest before they are in office.

[shiny!]

Re: (Un) Affordable Care Act - the Uncomfortable Truth

All for it. What about a 100% publicly financed election system. No private money in our politics, period.

Agree 100%. It would level the playing field for candidates who don't have Big Money to compete against the well-funded pols. To this I would add:

1. Campaigns can't officially start until 6 weeks before the election.

2. Every ballot should contain the option to choose "None of the Above". If NotA wins, the process has to start over with new candidates that are more to the liking of the electorate.

The way it stands now, we get corrupt candidates that we know are working for corporate interests, not our best interests. We are usually faced with the choice of bad or worse and have to hold our noses when we pull the lever. By having the option of NotA, we can send clear messages to party leaders that they had better stop selling us out, or we will bring government to a standstill.

[Penguin]

Re: (Un) Affordable Care Act - the Uncomfortable Truth

Yves Smith puts up the lamentations of someone who ~used~ to support ACA. Then he got into the nuts and bolts and found out what it actually does. Now? He calls it "sadistic"....

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/...st-the-49.html

~head palm~

You know what amazes me? What really, really makes me shake my head in disbelief?

That these folks actually believe a plan drawn up by the Heritage Foundation was going to produce a fair and equitable solution? Nah, there are dolts to be found every where. That said system ends up putting it to the self employed who are denied the government subsidy that many of the rest of us enjoy? No, the self employed seem to get it no matter who is in power.

No, what amazes me is that 5 years in the Democrats still haven't figured it out. They still think the president is on their side. Bwahahahahaha. Geebus. How many times do you have to be bent over the Resolute desk and given a stout "what for" before it starts to sink in?

Will

[Raz]

Re: (Un) Affordable Care Act - the Uncomfortable Truth

It's not that government employees are stupid. It's not that at all. That is a straw man argument.

It's that the incentives are wrong with government. Government people are spending other people's money. When you spend other people's money the incentive to find efficient, high-quality solutions is not there in the way that it is when it is your own money you spend.

If a private enterprise finds a way to provide a service at less input cost, that means more profit for the private enterprise.

If a government agency finds a way to provide a service at less input cost, that means a smaller budget next year for the agency, which means less power and less money for the people running the agency. Human nature being what it is, people want more power and more money - which means the incentive is for government agencies to never, ever solve the problems they were founded to solve - that would put them out of work - and to always require more money, every year.

See? It's not stupidity , it's incentives.

And I know that the Al Gore/smart government/reinventing government-type-liberals have fantasized forever that they're going to find a way to get those incentives right, but they never will. Because they are spending other people's money, and you never take as much care when you spend other people's money. Never have, never will.

That's why the private sector is always the more efficient way for society to provide goods and services, and that is why health care under government control will more and more resemble the defense department and the public schools and less and less resemble Silicon Valley.

The text highlighted above is absolutely true - I believe indisputably so.

Thank you, Mn_Mark.

[leegs]

Re: (Un) Affordable Care Act - the Uncomfortable Truth

Why just limit lobbying; get rid of it. No more bought politicians. I coined the term plotiticians because all the do is plot how to denigrate the opposition, mostly with lies.

Publicly fund political campaigns with limited but reasonable dollars. This would get rid of almost all negative campaigning and better stick to the issues.

I think it's relevant to separate 'lobbying' from the whole contribution thing. Lobbying as I understand it is a matter of speech - promoting a point of view, perhaps meeting with politicians to discuss subjects, etc. There must be a vehicle for concerned citizens to organize in a way to influence policy.

How this necessary and rightful 'speech' can be allowed, while limiting the role of money in elections, is the big problem.

[photon555]

Re: (Un) Affordable Care Act - the Uncomfortable Truth

This report from the Heritage Foundation is clearly and concisely written, eminently logical and reasonable, and offers a path to a patient centered health care system. It is detailed but not any longer than necessary. It has 54 references numbered in the text for those who desire more information and a starting point for more study. It was a pleasure to read an objective and rational study free of emotional bias.

http://www.heritage.org/research/rep...adline2_131114

The only thing I would add is a plea for incentivizing "mutual" health care organizations; those which are owned by their employees and users. I believe incentivizing wide spread ownership is the key to reducing wealth inequality, and should be employed in all economic areas, not just health care.

[Mn_Mark]

Re: (Un) Affordable Care Act - the Uncomfortable Truth

The only thing I would add is a plea for incentivizing "mutual" health care organizations; those which are owned by their employees and users. I believe incentivizing wide spread ownership is the key to reducing wealth inequality, and should be employed in all economic areas, not just health care.

What is wrong with wealth inequality?

As long as the person with more wealth earned it or was given it as a gift, what difference does it make?

Imagine two kids just let out of school for their summer vacations. They have three months to do as they wish. One of the kids spends the summer working - mowing lawns, babysitting, washing windows, doing chores, etc. The other one prefers to play with his friends and take it easy.

At the end of the summer, the kid who spent his days working has, let's say, $2,000 in the bank. The other kid has nothing. Relatively speaking, this is a huge wealth inequality.

Is there an injustice here? Is it wrong that one kid has $2,000 and the other kid has nothing?

Of course not. It is not only not unjust, it is perfectly just.

Those who complain about wealth inequality never seem to ask whether the wealth was earned. All they look at is how much wealth people have, and if it isn't "equal" in their estimation, then somehow a wrong has been committed and we need some "redistribution" to make it right.

Would it be right to take, say, 10% of that kid's money and give it to the kid who loafed all summer in the name of "reducing wealth inequality"? Of course not.

Here's another consideration: the more technologically advanced civilization becomes, the more wealth smart, disciplined people can create. In prehistoric times, the richest man in a tribe could not be very much richer than the poorest man because the only wealth there was was animal caracasses, spears, axes, etc. No matter how clever and hard-working a man was, he could not amass very much more wealth than the dullest and laziest man.

In our time, a man can organize a company that develops an operating system that people (voluntarily!) standarize on, and make himself $100 billion dollars, every dollar of which was earned, was voluntarily paid by people who bought his operating system because it was more valuable to them than the money he was asking for it. If he has $100 billion dollars of wealth, it means he generated more than $100 billion dollars of value for society, and he was rewarded by getting to keep $100 billion of that wealth. And he created that value out of his intelligence, his organizing skills, his superior ability to estimate what people would want and provide it to them at a price they find acceptable.

It bothers me not one bit that Bill Gates has $100 billion dollars while other people have almost nothing. The wealth you have is actually quite an accurate measure of how much economic value you have brought into this world - concrete, real economic value that other people are willing to pay for.

Instead of thinking some injustice has occurred because some people have vast amounts of money and others have little, I celebrate that we have advanced in our science and technology to the point where a smart and disciplined man can create that much value, and that I can purchase for $300 an operating system that took a million man-hours to create, or watch for $7 a movie that cost $200 million dollars to make.

The only question to ask with regard to "wealth inequality" is whether the rich obtained their wealth through legal transactions. If so, their wealth is none of your business. It did not come out of your pocket or the pockets of the "poor" - it was obtained by providing value that people voluntarily paid for. Figure out how to create some wealth yourself or how to help the poor create more wealth instead of looking for rationalizations for why you have a right to rob the rich of money they earned legally.

[seobook]

Re: (Un) Affordable Care Act - the Uncomfortable Truth

If he has $100 billion dollars of wealth, it means he generated more than $100 billion dollars of value for society, and he was rewarded by getting to keep $100 billion of that wealth. And he created that value out of his intelligence, his organizing skills, his superior ability to estimate what people would want and provide it to them at a price they find acceptable.

Even if one is willing to ignore any monopoly issues associated with web browsers and so on, one still must make a distinction between creating/expanding/standardizing new markets (like Gates did) and the negative-value-for-society grifting the largest US banks have engaged in.

The wealth you have is actually quite an accurate measure of how much economic value you have brought into this world - concrete, real economic value that other people are willing to pay for.

Even if/when said people were against the bailouts 100:1 to even 300:1?

If some entities are able to create bad debt & foist it onto others at par while booking profits, that isn't a measure of what people were willing to pay for when the only alternatives would be going Galt or leaving the country.

The only question to ask with regard to "wealth inequality" is whether the rich obtained their wealth through legal transactions. If so, their wealth is none of your business. It did not come out of your pocket or the pockets of the "poor" - it was obtained by providing value that people voluntarily paid for. Figure out how to create some wealth yourself or how to help the poor create more wealth instead of looking for rationalizations for why you have a right to rob the rich of money they earned legally.

A couple counter points on this one...

• WalMart, where you are forced to pay for the food stamps & other subsidies for their poorly paid employees & something like half or more of their valuation is driven by various transfer payments
• drug companies which have monopolistic abuse exemptions for themselves encoded into law & then sue states which allow free trade

the more technologically advanced civilization becomes, the more wealth smart, disciplined people can create.

I don't think anyone who is rational would dispute that fact, but it is also worth mentioning reward mechanisms & distribution curves.

As one example (among many) consider this article. Note this article:

Given that they are prepared to take a specific illegal picture down manually once it has been identified, why not do so automatically? They have the software to recognize specific pictures.

A copyright holder has to continuously & repeatedly file takedown requests over and over again...endlessly, even when the media has already been fingerprinted.

The reason for this is to shift costs onto the original publisher on the hopes that they will make their content directly accessible for free. Google Images in years gone by would send publishers traffic when someone clicked on their images. Now the full sized image appears on Google's image search result page & publishers get very little traffic. Worse yet, Google's internal human rater documents state to give a lower rating for photos that are watermarked, so if you try to protect your property or justify getting nothing in return for giving away your content you can't even chalk it up to a brand benefit, as your watermarked image may score lower than someone who takes it & crops it to avoid showing the watermark.

Now consider that same sort of process is going on not only in photos but with books/ebooks, web pages, videos, music, and so on...nearly every form of media.

As monopolies benefit from network effects, they renegotiate after the fact in ways that are often abusive. Consider how Yelp reviews were stolen wholesale & it took a governmental review for that to stop.

The only thing that stopped Google from powering Yahoo!'s ads was a credible threat of lawsuit from regulators. If you are an "edge case" business that runs afoul of Google's ever-changing "best practices" (renegotiated after the fact, and in some cases ex-post-facto) then if they say you are done...you are.

And with Google's knowledge graph, in the new "in context" feature they are testing, extracted content from third party sites appears right on Google, with a big blue link to a related ad-filled Google search & a tiny hard-to-see gray link from the source that was scraped from.
http://moz.com/blog/future-serp-a-glimpse-at-google-2014



I wouldn't argue that there is no value being created from search (and I probably wouldn't be an SEO if I did ;)), but certainly people could debate some of the above stuff and presume that might-makes-right winner-take-all might not be the best strategy for building a society around.

A compelling read on that front is Jaron Lanier's Who Owns the Future.

What's more, even these very companies that have these dominant monopoly positions work with direct competitors to hold down their own labor costs & then spread the gospel about us needing more H1B visas to further drive down the wages of their employees...so in many cases even if you are on the winning team, the team itself may conspire against your interests.

[vt]

Re: (Un) Affordable Care Act - the Uncomfortable Truth

In a sense Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and other billionaires that have decided to give away their wealth through foundations to many worthy causes. This is a wonderful form of wealth distribution. A political system that gives them the freedom to create companies that succeed greatly and provide tens of thousands of jobs which contribute taxes and savings for the nation.

Government is necessary, but where they hold back the creation in the productive economy we are all made poorer. Governments should of course preserve competition so monopolies don't close it out. But governments have no right to redistribute justly earned wealth. They do tax it at a higher rate, but too high and the economy is actually harmed.

The great majority of the wealthy give back much to society. The ones that need to be controlled are the banksters and others that abuse their position and harm society.

You don't punish all for the sins of a few.

[shiny!]

Re: (Un) Affordable Care Act - the Uncomfortable Truth

The only question to ask with regard to "wealth inequality" is whether the rich obtained their wealth through legal transactions. If so, their wealth is none of your business.

I most strongly and respectfully disagree! Politicians have been bought and purchased by FIRE plutocrats to write laws which support their interests over the interests of the poor and middle class. As a result, the middle class is being absolutely gutted. Soon we will be like Mexico with a tiny ruling class and an enormous body of very poor people. The only question to ask with regard to such severe and growing wealth inequality as we're seeing today isn't whether they obtained their wealth through legal means, but whether they obtained it through moral and ethical means.

It did not come out of your pocket or the pockets of the "poor" - it was obtained by providing value that people voluntarily paid for.

When my hard-earned dollars are taken from me by force in the form of taxes and used to bail out Wall Street, and when banksters then reward themselves with million dollar bonuses, their wealth absolutely comes out of my pocket, and yours, too! When their wealth comes from getting their money from the Fed for free, then turning around and loaning us that money at high interest rates, then taking our homes when the depression they caused costs us our jobs... their wealth absolutely comes from our pockets.

Figure out how to create some wealth yourself or how to help the poor create more wealth instead of looking for rationalizations for why you have a right to rob the rich of money they earned legally.

Rob the rich? Commit murder, you get 7-15 years. Rob a bank, you get life imprisonment. Work for Wall Street and rob the wealth of an entire country, the President will appoint you to run the Treasury. How's that for us robbing the rich?

What we're experiencing now is an obscene transfer of wealth from the middle class to a very tiny minority of super wealthy who are not adding value to society. FIRE is bankrupting us. It's totally legal because the plutocrats have the best politicians money can buy writing the laws in their favor.

That's why capital gains aren't taxed as highly as workingmen's wages.

That's why Glass-Steagall was repealed, leading to the devastating co-mingling of commercial banks with investment banks.

High frequency trading creates tremendous wealth for a few, rigs the markets against honest individual traders, and doesn't add any value whatsoever. But it's legal, so that makes it OK?

Credit derivative swaps, financial instruments so complex that nobody understands how they work, have bankrupted pensions, school districts and entire cities. But they're legal, so that makes it OK?

In their insatiable desire to make billion dollar bonuses without actually adding any value to society, TBTF banks leveraged themselves to insane degrees, putting the entire world's financial system at risk. They caused a depression that is literally killing people even today. The inflation we're exporting as a result of the euphamistically termed "QE" is driving up the cost of food and causing starvation to people in 3rd world countries. But what the banks did was perfectly legal, so that makes it OK?

When sociopaths get venal politicians to rig laws in their favor, when they use the law to make it harder and harder for the poor to create wealth or even preserve what little they have, how can you blame the victims without holding the thieves accountable at all?

/rant

[Mn_Mark]

Re: (Un) Affordable Care Act - the Uncomfortable Truth

Even if one is willing to ignore any monopoly issues associated with web browsers and so on, one still must make a distinction between creating/expanding/standardizing new markets (like Gates did) and the negative-value-for-society grifting the largest US banks have engaged in.



Even if/when said people were against the bailouts 100:1 to even 300:1?

• WalMart, where you are forced to pay for the food stamps & other subsidies for their poorly paid employees & something like half or more of their valuation is driven by various transfer payments
• drug companies which have monopolistic abuse exemptions for themselves encoded into law & then sue states which allow free trade

I wouldn't argue that there is no value being created from search (and I probably wouldn't be an SEO if I did ;)), but certainly people could debate some of the above stuff and presume that might-makes-right winner-take-all might not be the best strategy for building a society around.

I think we're talking past one another a little bit here.

My point was to say that those who are wealthy from creating value and trading it to others in voluntary transactions are justly wealthy, and that there is no wrong there, and nothing wrong with the resulting wealth inequality.

You point out instances where some people cheated to get wealthy, or used connections with cronies in the government to get taxpayer money to bail them out.

I agree that the government has no business handing out taxpayer money to bail out banks, and it has no business giving special exemptions to lobbyists and big donors. But this is a failure of big government, and is not relevant to the point I was making, which is that wealth inequality is not wrong if the wealthy got their money honestly.

Surely you agree that the kid who works all summer is entitled to be "wealthy" compared to the kid who didn't. Surely you agree that a company that makes a product or provides a service that lots of people are happy to buy is entitled to make its owners wealthy, and there is no wrong in this "wealth inequality".

Yes, let's find ways to shrink government and limit its power so that the politicians and bureaucrats that run it no longer have the power to make their private sector cronies wealthy. But lets not make the assumption, which I think people on the left generally do, that wealth disparities are a sign of injustice. I think it is the sign of a healthy modern economy. The more advanced our technologies become, the more there will naturally be wealth disparities because the smart and disciplined and ambitious people can create more value, while the dull and lazy continue to create almost none.

Socialist economies and primitive economies have little wealth disparity because everyone is poor. Wealth disparity is the sign of a modern and free economy, and it is a good thing. It is a sign that smart people have the tools and freedom and property rights that allow them to generate massive amounts of value, and that is good for all of us.