Let's see how the incoming Republican slashing of medicare affects rural hospitals for starters. You really think I'm sweating it that my taxes will go down because Jethro's coffin is cheaper than his meds? I'm sick of offering help to people who want nothing more than to spit in my eye. There's a whole boatload of urban money that could be used to improve the lot of these people, but if they don't want it, fine, just don't fuck things up for the rest of us on the way down.
It's fairly simple based on conservative ideology but like a lot of things a political theory doesn't translate into our reality the same way. At the core of conservative beliefs rest individual liberties and responsibilities. The "I'm not entitled to claim other peoples' work (through taxes) as other people aren't entitled to mine" is a big part of the "voting against their self interest." Simply put, my self interest morally shouldn't involve entitlement to others work. Thus I'll vote for the person that doesn't raise taxes on higher incomes to provide me benefits over one that will. The problem that conservatives I think have failed to address is articulating the level of interaction via social programs that our society does need from our government. They don't couch it right to begin with then add in partisan fighting and rhetoric and it become all or nothing both ways. You get one side screaming the government needs to step in at all instances to create a "even" playing field and the other side screaming about bootstraps. I'd love to debate the balance between the individuals responsibilities in their lives vs how much they should rely on government programs. It's an interesting debate and I think societal and psychologically we should be focused on pushing the individual mindset, work to improve yourself instead of relying on outside forces, even if we end up using collective resources managed by the government in some capacity. In reality, myself included, given the option, free money (through various government programs) it's just natural to take the money, self interest wins, morals be damned. Though I technically paid into unemployment via my employers contributions, thus a smaller wage for me, the government contributes the other half with taxes. Given the option of getting hundreds of dollars a week for listing two job applications or getting part time shit work? I took the money, who wouldn't? It's hypocritical but it's also human, and I think ultimately we need to strive for personal responsibility, getting multiple shit jobs between finding long term employment over government assistance.
Part of it is that Republicans have much better rhetoric, and are much more willing to flagrantly use rhetoric for rhetoric's sake rather than develop some that actually reflects their policies. All of the talk about messaging and slogans about last year make my eye start twitching but in the end, yeah, that's largely what matters. The response to asking what the message was for Hillary was to start ticking off her policies and her plans and people would stop that halfway through, say they stopped listening, and wanted to know what could fit on a hat. Politics is boring and people are lazy and people don't want to read more than a few words about things they don't understand. Democratic messaging often doesn't fit neatly into slogans and sound bites and snappy interviews (or at least there isn't much effort to try) and people aren't going to do the work of listening or reading or doing the work themselves to find what the plans and policies are. They'd rather shout Make America Great Again regardless of it being largely impossible to return to the America they think they want again, or that that America was only great for very few demographics, or that there are no plans or policies for how that's going to happen anyway. They'd rather listen to "everyone is going to have much better and much cheaper insurance, believe me" without looking into it further than "we're going to improve insurance and here's how" followed by an 8 point plan that relies on the listener already having some understanding of the basic principles behind how insurance already works. They'd rather hear "I'm here for you, working class, you're all going to have a million jobs each within a month of me becoming president" from the guy who just arrived from his golden fifth avenue penthouse without any plan or policies than "let's talk about my economic plans and my education plans and my workers rights plans and my job creation plans that when all working together will help improve things, which may improve differently than returning to how things were in the past, and I can only give a brief summary in my speeches but I do have a bunch of ten page policy papers on my website you can go read yourself if you'd like!" So they sit there and think "well this guy said 'jobs! Jobs! Jobs!' And this guy, I don't know, said a bunch of other words I stopped paying attention to, so therefore they don't care about jobs and don't have any plans for them." Same thing goes for not on the campaign trail when they're talking about their policies. We're not trying to chip away at abortion rights, we're protecting the health and safety of women! We're not trying to return to making healthcare exhorbitantly expensive for the sick and the poor in exchange for tax cuts for the ultra wealthy, we're giving people the freedom to choose between selling your house to pay for chemo and dying of cancer because they're no longer able to afford insurance! We're not trying to legislatively define lgbtq people as second-class citizens, we're protecting the freedom of christians! And by the way, the other side wants to take away all your guns that you already own and prevent you from ever buying a gun again! They want to make it legal to abort precious babies the day before the due date! And people just eat it up. It's this huge reliance on people not putting in any effort themselves to read between the lines or actually looking into what they're proposing or educating themselves about the issues as a whole and it works because people don't want to do that. Hiding the motivations and intentions behind their legislation with all this coding has been a huge part of the Republican Party since the southern strategy (the whole infamous Atwater quote about "You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”) only I get the impression that back then Republican voters were in on it and nowadays most of them are not. There's also this weird mental trick or cognitive dissonance that goes even further beyond "I don't want anyone else to be able to do or have this, until I need it, then it's fine, but I'm the only one it's okay for" that's rampant when it comes to things like welfare, abortion, or insurance on the right. But I see again and again that when they're taking advantage of these same programs they don't even think of themselves as using those programs. It's not just "I hate those poor people over there in the city who use all these welfare programs why can't they just get a job! I know I'm on unemployment right now too but I NEED it and yeah I've been unemployed for a while but you know finding a job is really hard." It's also "I hate those poor people over there in the city living a life of luxury off all their free government money while I'm here struggling on food stamps." I'll never forget during the 2012 elections when some Republican was rallying against big government spending on welfare and he said something like "You know I wasn't always making a good living. I was struggling, and I was on unemployment and I was on food stamps and the government wasn't helping ME out! But then I pulled myself up from my bootstraps etc etc" (Found the kernel of it.) It's just this total disconnect. If you don't even think of yourself as the same person these policies are talking about of course you're going to vote against your own interests. All that big government stuff is only benefiting THEM.
I think voting for some people is more of a cultural identity. Like the "conservative Christian". When Nixon realized that you can use that to get a huge voting block, they jumped all over that shit. Historically, whites and blacks in the south aren't that much different economically.(after slavery, of course) White farmers and black farmers just after the civil war were all quite poor. And the politicians knew that so the strategy they came up with was to, generally speaking, make the white population feel superior to the black population via segregation and other bullshit in order to keep them from realizing they were all equally poor. If the overall population were to realize that they were all in this together and the politicians were fucking them, their coalition would be very dangerous. No matter how little they had, at least they weren't black. That mentality started the Jim Crow laws and all of the racist-ass policies notorious to the south in this country. If you can keep the groups fighting amongst themselves, there is no limit to how bad you can fuck them over without them really knowing about it. If you take a group of people who by and large, are less educated and more blue collar, they are more vulnerable to being manipulated by those in power. You can play to their religion or to their cultural identity as a southerner or whatever other low-hanging fruit ripe for picking. It's what the politicians have done to the military and veterans. Donald Trump was able to convince people to vote for him based on racial fear of the other. If you can get people to hate terrorist Muslims and rapist Mexicans, they will ignore it when you rob them of healthcare and social services. It's a classic strategy that worked yet again.
This is the core of the Ayn Rand part of the conservative philosophy, and I challenge it in this way: Prove to me that a large segment of society can realistically live this way. This is fine for folks in Montana that will live off the grid and Koch brothers who can afford their own private security, etc. But for the vast majority of people, we need an inter-connected society with safety nets. Taxes are structure so that everyone pays their fair share (I know, I know, that shit's broken too). It's not an entitlement, it's an enablement and this is the factor that people mythologize or forget. You're literate because of an education you didn't pay for. You're alive and free because of a military, police force and regulatory system you didn't pay for. You drive on roads, use electricity and eat food safely because of a system of laws, enforcement and standardization that you didn't pay for. If you think of taxes as "your money", I think it's flawed logic: you have received FAR more than you've paid in, and likely always will. Not a single one of us can legitimately claim to not have benefited from this system, and the whole "bootstraps" side of it is wrapped up in illogical thinking (for every Ben Carson there are literally thousands of DeAndre Hopkins -the kid from the book "the Wire" was based on) and intentional suffering. This is fine if we're all starting from scratch on the frontier, with whatever we stuck in our wagon. But we don't all start from the same place, aren't all equipped with the same capabilities, and the system doesn't treat us the same (which is becoming increasingly obvious). It boggles my mind that the deeply Christian conservative movement is now predicated on denying help, health care and services to the poorest and most desperate among us, in the richest society in history. This reeks of "you don't deserve help, because you are different from me or didn't suffer as much as I did". It's frankly scary to think there are people with this mindset trying to run our government. I think this is deeply flawed logic, steeped in mythology and it results in a government that is at best, dysfunctional. I agree that the problem with modern conservatives is that their approach to government and regulation is lop-sided. The poor should feel a dramatic government presence in their lives as benevolent and not as a regulatory interference. The wealthy, and more importantly, the organizations they run, should feel a regulatory pinch from time to time, because the impact of the organization is so much more powerful than the individual (see: Enron, AIG, nearly any environmental impact study, etc.). I think the donors are the reason for this lop-sidedness: the constituents buy into this, but the donors/lobbyists/politicians actually create the opposite. The notion of personal independence is vital, I grant you, and one that we could all stand to improve. But it's PERSONAL, as in, my ability to be independent and contribute to society is different than yours. It's inherently unfair that my parents could afford x and yours couldn't, and a functioning government levels the playing field to a minimum standard, allows for second chances or mistakes and enables personal independence to be developed.
Unfortunately, what many in this country don't understand is that the poverty line is roughly 11.5k. Worldwide that puts you in the top 13%. I get it though, we want to raise all boats as high as we can but never lose sight of the fact of just how good people really have it here even in the worst of circumstances. If you really want to see humanity travel to sub-Saharan Africa or India, you never know how good you have it until you see how bad it can get. Beyond that, what is the minimum standard that everyone will agree on? Free healthcare....free college.....universal income.....what? I came from nothing and worked my ass off to get where I am, Neither of my parents had a college education, had no way of helping me, I took student loans, worked full time while going to school more than full time, went without and made hard choices. Now I feel like I am taxed to death and see nothing in return, to some degree, based on how people in my income bracket are characterized you would think I have something to be ashamed of. I look around and see people complaining about being $100k in debt with student loans and they got a liberal arts degree or I see people sitting at home not even trying or people getting knocked up out of wedlock and all I see is people who made bad choices, that's not my problem. How can a lawmaker convince me that I should want to vote for them if they are going to raise taxes or add more social programs or whatever?
I have been to some of the poorest countries on Earth. It scares me how similar their government and ours operates. Also, what is this logic: your life in America sucks, but it could be worse if you were Somalian! How is this an actual comfort or a solution to problems we as a society have? Oden, by your logic you would ensure your kids start off the way you did. How does that feel? I mean, ensure that they had exactly the same resource and were forced to make the same choices, the "worked my ass off , made hard choice and went without". Why? What's the benefit there? Fairness? I'm genuinely asking, here. Also, your perspective discounts how much of success is blind luck. I don't know about your personally, but there have been dozens of forks in the road that I lucked out by taking/not taking (how many times would your life have unravelled differently if you'd had a DUI in college or knocked someone up at 19?). I have to call bullshit on this "I did it all myself" in 2017. John Galt is fictional, and anyone successful needed help, advice, support or protection along the way. That being true does not detract from your success or accomplishments in any way, but there are legions of people that helped make it POSSIBLE. That's how society works. The fact that you didn't die in childhood attests to the fact that we're improving and our society as a whole is working: safer, smarter, healthier as a whole than any time in our history. It's interesting, because in some of the shitholes I've lived in (Honduras, Indonesia for a sample), there WAS free healthcare and free college, or at least dramatically subsidized care/school. I agree it's not about higher taxes, that's a hard sell for anyone. It's about more effective government, ensuring that everyone has a fair shot, regardless of race, parents' wealth, or circumstance. Your "bad choice" is at it's heart condescension. You knew how to put a condom on to avoid getting someone knocked up, you knew what degree was going to pay off and you knew how to go out and find a job. Good! But, how did you know those things? It's likely someone took the time to teach you, or help you distinguish between what's really going to help you and what's bullshit. I know plenty of kids who were told "it doesn't matter what degree" because that's what their parents knew. Or kids who were told condoms are 90% effective, so why bother (thanks, abstinence-only education!). I don't know anyone who's a fan of taxes, but I think if you believe the money you spend in taxes is taken out of your pocket, versus a fair price of admission, you'll be resentful. Your "bad choice" was someone else's "I didn't know any better" or someone else's "I didn't HAVE a choice", and at a certain point they shouldn't be damned to poverty because of it. My last point is that we know we will have to live together. The more we're in it together, the better. This is true for wages (the people who make enough to live on don't depend on government programs and they BUY WHAT YOU SELL), this is true for health (people who are educated take care of themselves) and it's true for people who believe society helped them. Again, the people who actually contribute less than they receive are an incredibly rare minority, and even they (Warren Buffet, for example) would pay higher taxes than they currently pay. It's a far better bargain to pay your fair share at this point in your life and be taken care of later than skimp and have to clean up the fucking mess we are in. Think about the healthcare costs of the obesity epidemic, the ridiculous amount of work it will take to un-fuck our public education mess (the contentious "argument" over evolution, for example), and the effort in re-developing crime-ridden areas. In other words, paying into a fair and equitable system is a far better investment than balking at taxes and then having to spend MORE on healthcare, education and public safety over time.
The old "American poor people are better off than poor people everywhere else" argument. What's the point of bringing this up? To make American poor people feel guilty for not being as skeletal as a Somali? This is no different than pointing out to a black dude that, yes, you're in prison on some bullshit, but at least slavery isn't legal. That healthcare is a for-profit business is morally repugnant. That there are executives that get rich on the ability of sick people to pay or not to continue living is fucking awful. That's a start. Congratulations on working hard. No snark. My mom did the same thing and had two kids to raise while speaking little to no English for a while. As to the "taxed to death" part of this, I can't help your feelings, but statistically speaking, taxes are at their lowest pretty much in US history. You feel demonized because (I'm assuming ) you are upper-middle class and people in charge want to keep cutting taxes for people like you. The same taxes that help pay for cops, roads, and healthcare for those not fortunate to have ended up like you. When those that are at a lower socio-economic level than you that have to depend on those taxpayer services see that people in your tax bracket are getting tax cuts, golden parachutes and record corporate profits, of course they're going to be pissed. Especially when a guy like Warren Buffett is saying he isn't being taxed enough. Seriously, think about that for a second. You scratched your way up, so I'm assuming you know what it's like to have no money. It doesn't at least irritate you that one of the richest people in the fucking world says he doesn't pay enough in taxes? Those same taxes that could have paid for job training, better infrastructure or whatever it is that you could have needed? Where are you seeing "all these people"? Are there multitudes of college graduates with student loans and teenage mothers just milling around your house? Seriously though, just because you managed to do all of those things you said you did doesn't mean you should have had to have done it. That you already have done it doesn't mean other people should have to do it. Making other people work, what looks to me like a fucking insane amount, for what exactly? Some kind of satisfaction that strangers you will never meet met your nebulous level of work ethic? Or that they suffered like you did? If we all followed that line of thinking, we'd still have children with missing fingers working in factories for bowls of soot-laced gruel. There is a deeply fucked up and pervasive thought process among conservatives that poor people take some kind of joy in being shiftless layabouts. Nobody likes being poor. Nobody likes being told that because they are poor, that they matter less than people that have more money. It's really great that you managed to make a comfortable living for yourself. Again, no snark, you are the type of person more people should aspire to be like. But a lot of the people that aspire to be in a place that you are in now are not hetero white dudes that have parents that apparently cared for them. But expecting those people that didn't have your circumstances to do as well as you when deck is stacked more against them than it ever was for you is unrealistic. And blaming them instead of the fucked up system that made it happen in the first place isn't particularly helpful. If I were a lawmaker, the extra money I would get out of taxes from the better off, would go towards prevention of our societal ills and not the symptoms. You want less crime? Hire more cops. You want less teenage pregnancy? Teach sex ed in schools that isn't abstinence only and provide free birth control and condoms. You want college graduates with less student loan debt? Provide universal education. All of these cost taxes. I'm not naive enough to believe that every government program works. However, people and corporations are sitting on billions of dollars that are doing essentially nothing. For example, Apple has more than $250 billion in cash. It's time that those that have benefited from the system paid back into it.
These two sentences encapsulate what I am trying to say. Rich folks with hearts like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates say they aren't taxed enough and should be taxed more all the time. You know what they don't do? They don't mail in extra to the US Treasury beyond what their division-sized elements of corporate accountants can get the number stripped down to. Instead, they take all of that money and donate to charity or create charitable organizations. They seem to understand very well that they can do it better than the Government, the same thing I continue to try to say with my posts. Our Government is not any good at Social programming and is basically pissing money away. To address the rest of what you are saying and Jimmy James as well: My point has never been that people shouldn't be taken care of, they should. My point is that we need to first develop a better way of doing it than what our Government currently does because right now we do not have smart enough people in control of a very complex system that stretches across multiple Government organizations, programs, etc. Until we figure out a way to make what we have work, I'm not interested in throwing more money at it. To some degree, I don't know if there are smart enough people or people actually interested in public service to make the changes necessary as they are so wide-ranging and complex in nature. I view the system as unfixable in it's current state because it is all tied up in political wrangling, lobbying and greed. That is kind of nebulous but as an example: If the Government is going to guarantee college loans then they need to make requirements for the degrees sought, such as STEM now and have industrial advisory committees where the marketplace tells the Government what their needs in the labor force are and then make those the required degree fields. Kids then have a chance of making it, it takes shitty parenting and decision making away from the individual in a smart way. America is smarter than what we are showing but instead of doing smart things we are lazy and allowing lobbyists to control the decisions we make. Still, a fix this simple seem insurmountable in the face our Government's ability to operate and this is not meant to be a partisan statement. That is meant to be a statement of what the last 30 years of politics has produced.
The two guys you're mentioning have donated more than $4B at last count and the Gates foundation sets the standards for high-functioning non-profits. Don't hate the player, hate the game. Also, the commonly-held belief that keeping their taxes low somehow benefits the rest of us is fucking nonsense, and both of those guys would be just as productive under the current tax rate as they would have been under the 95% tax rate in 1947 (Seriously...95%, in the so-called "golden years"). The hypocrisy behind the conservatives if somewhat baffling: so many hallmarks of that time period, like the nuclear family, jobs for life, American pre-eminence in technology, space, manufacturing, and so little acknowledgement of the infrastructure and government of the time that made it work. I agree with you: if they aren't taxed enough, they should mail in the excess. To your second point, that's not how government works, certainly not in a democracy. It's not really even how nature works. You can't scrap it and start over. It's done by small incremental changes in response to our environment. Money in our government is something of a cancer, as it corrupts how resources are supposed to flow. It can always get better, in counterpoint to your "it could always be worse" comment. It's our job, in a democracy to pay attention, vote, participate and pay taxes to ENSURE it gets better. It requires effort, and this disengagement is dangerous. I completely agree that there are parts of our government that can be more effective and parts that piss money away. It sucks, and it deserves our attention. However, it doesn't mean we ignore their purpose or what they set out to do. It also doesn't mean that we assess a dollar value and privatize it. Why? Because it almost always results in corruption of that purpose. See: for profit prisons. I can't understand this logic: you're saying the government should only allow loans for certain majors? There are protections like this in place (accreditation, standards to receive loans, etc.) and they are often under-enforced. Again, this seems to be a recurring theme: the laws exist, they aren't enforced, so it seems the system doesn't work, and the reality is so much of that grunt work the system depends on isn't getting done. I struggle with the notion at any level that the government gets to tell adults what they can and can't study, according to industries. That's a dangerous precipice to stand on. I agree with you: our leadership sucks. We have incredibly smart people, but they are focusing on manipulation and fuckery, not making things actually better. Climate change, for me, is the bell weather issue here: an overwhelming scientific consensus, but our representatives are hell bent on denying it and will come up with incredible feats of logic to perpetuate that denial. I think the worst part of our system is an absence of leadership. Does anyone believe that someone like FDR is in the wings, ready to help the common man despite being a fucking Roosevelt? That's leadership and our current system just doesn't have it. We don't elect it, and when we do it's often ground to a pulp. By starving what we have of money or resources, we ensure it doesn't work. We're seeing this now: Baltimore has a murder rate like a Rambo movie, because there's no enforcement. Education is a shit-show, because the teachers have no power or resources and we're forced to pay them less than minimum wage. Our institutions decay because they don't have funding to do their fucking jobs. If you pay no taxes, you end up with higher costs, but you also end up with no investment into society. Your taxes ensure you're invested and you behave on that investment (read about social capital, or check out "Bowling Alone"). I think it's far more common for people to disconnect and when you do, you only see the monster swamp in the news, not Mayberry out the window. Our system is indeed broken, and it won't be solved by disengagement. At any level.
I think you are missing my point or I am missing yours. I take their position as saying that they know better how to spend their money to help people than the Government and that is why they don't mail in anything more than what is required by law. The other part of what you are saying in terms of tax rates and Government function; I would say that you have to look at the era. We just came out of a World War where all resources were mobilized toward a single goal that we all had in common. It worked, yet the tax rate was continually lowered from that point forward for a reason. Today all resources are marshaled toward thousands of goals that nobody agrees upon. The population in America was also one-third of today's as well and we had all of the infrastructure and world-wide manufacturing. Today we are busily de-industrializing (the jobs that create things and with it real GDP) as fast as we can and the EPA is ensuring it continues to just offshore the pollution. In essence, it is a different world today than it was then. Maybe they only guarantee loans on certain majors. Or maybe they only fund tuition for certain majors, if we go that route. If little Johnny or little Debbie want an Art History degree or degree in Sanskrit, mommy and daddy have to pay for it. We should be funding things that benefit society and the individual who needs the help, not pissing money down holes. This isn't telling anyone what to do, this is saying if you want to make a mistake, use your money doing it, not the taxpayers.
See it's gotten so heated that you'll eventually see conservatives rail against fairly common things we've agreed upon, roads, schooling (before they were turned into liberal indoctrination centers ha chachacha), the military, etc you end up getting some wierd fringe shit. You have to realize that their is a flip side where it is insanely frustrating to hear a greater role in our lives when there are endless examples of goverment bureaucracy and politics mucking up any given subject. The amount of government spending just to justify their budgets. Nightmare red tape and regulations and the cost those add to small businesses. Hell, giving the power to the government to wage a war on drugs. Having to explain economic realities with endless evidence, like the minimum wage, that just don't work in the real world. Day one, finance 101 we learned the minimum wage in the end reduces the buying power of the low skilled through various forces, increased cost of goods, decreased earning power through reduced hours, etc. The whole reason America stood out when it came to founding our constitution was how heavily we limited the goverment and left decision making up to the states, or if not specified, to the people. The Bill of Rights being almost entirey focused on what the government couldn't do to the individual. Religion was an entity of power they wanted limited in the government so there is no federal state sponsership of any particular religion, no religous test to gain office, and the government can't prohibit the free excersice of any religion (a check on their powers to regulate religion). The seperation of powers and how each branch had a different election or appointment process. State reps were elected directly from their district by popular vote, Senators were appointed by state legislatures (until the constitution was amended), SCOTUS was appointed by the Executive and confirmed by the Senate, and the president being elected by the electoral college system. It was all structured to limit the goverment from becoming too powerful and in the end effecting the individual. While I think we can agree that the idea of the social contract enforced by an elected goverment has its purposes. The extent we agree to and the amount of force we allow the goverment to have, I think, should be framed in preserving individual freedoms and responsibilities through limiting government and not the government IS the answer. The big elephant in the room has become big business and it's power to influence the goverment more than the people that actually vote to be represented by it. We've basically turned the right to petition the government into a clearing house for the biggest donors to get what they want through "lobbying." Hardcore conservatives use dergulation as the be all end all only answer, which just won't work if the lobbying power is still there. We need major legislative changes to lobbying as petitioning the government and campaign finance reform. edit: Fuck I hate writing these wall of text post only to see that there were half a dozen more I should have put responses to that were posted in the interim.
Im with Oden in that the means of delivery for our safety nets is the problem. At some point with AI and automation we'll have to have some sort of negative income tax or universal basic income for large segments of the population that won't be able to ever find work. Im hopeful in the Star Trek outlook kind of way, in that some point we'll have enough technology to allow us to pursue life outside of providing for oneself with a career. Others think it's all distopian class warfare battles until the computers launch Judgement Day. Until then..... I think from a psychological standpoint the individual responsibility route of running your life creates better results in the long run than relying on outside entities to support you in everything that could be seen as a struggle. You take home ownership as an example. A person that has spent years working and diligently paying off a mortgage is going to want to keep the house in good working order, wants to keep the equity in it. With public housing it become part of the broken window theory. They have no reason to keep it up, no connection to it outside of a government check. Do we want to just give people housing or find some way to incentivize the own their own house? Im not against safety nets, just have to be focused in a way that provides the right incentives for the users to become self sufficient. As a delivery system this is why I support things like pell grants as it is more along the lines of teaching a man to fish instead of just giving him a fish.
This argument always stands out to me. Did you know that food companies also produce food for a profit? In addition, energy companies sell various forms of energy to supply heat to homes, also at a profit. On top of all that, clothing companies make huge profits selling things that are required for people to go out in public. Should all of these things be supplied at-cost for everyone, since they are necessities? If you believe that, who would be in a business that makes no profit when there are other businesses that do make a profit? I think you lack a basic understanding of economics. If you want society to pay for everyone's medical care equally, then state that, but don't demonize anyone for providing a service and expecting to be paid market rates for it. You are welcome to provide your services at-cost any time you choose.
Just about everything you've mentioned (other than healthcare) has some sort of competition or government price control to keep it affordable by people, even if they're on welfare. Clothing can be had for a few bucks from the local Walmart. Energy is price controlled by most governments due to the lack of competition and common infrastructure required to deliver it. Healthcare is something that has very low competition, and is something that you can't pick up from Walmart for a few bucks. The insurance companies and healthcare industry have insane markups and restrictions on their policies to ensure profits. Take a look at the Epipen... price bumped over 450% after they bought politicians who legislated it to be the only allowed solution in public schools, etc. That shit should be illegal, but nope, the exec who did it got a 700% raise out of the deal after he pulled it off. I am not against people or corporations making a profit... but when they rig the system against the community in order to legislate that monopoly and the profit that follows, that's wrong. I do not believe that you can trust corporations to do the right thing... they need to have some sort of oversight. Net neutrality is a prime example... there are serious monopolies in place and the FCC is doing their bidding in rolling back the consumer protections that were put in place... all in the name of making the ISP's and monopolies more money. In the end, I firmly believe that global health care is something that should be a basic right of any member of a country, and the country should do things as close to break-even as possible to achieve that... it's in the best interest of the country to keep their citizens healthy.
There's been a couple of times public housing has come up here or in the other thread that's shown people think that public housing is free and that the buildings aren't well kept because the tenants don't put any effort into it. I'm only familiar with a couple housing markets, but in none of them is public housing free. The rent is, more or less, based on a percentage of the household income which ends up being lower than market value and the landlord is subsidized by government funds. (I think in NYC if not everywhere there's also some kind of rent assistance program that covers a portion of the rent for low-income families not living in public housing too, but is also at least typically not 100% covered.) And, just like with every other rental, it's the building management that's responsible for upkeep of the building, not the tenants, and the reason it's not great is because they don't have enough resources for maintenance slash who cares since it's just a bunch of poor people. Is that...not how it works everywhere?
Anybody with a weapon can kill an animal, eat it and make clothes with their skin while using fire to do it. What a person cannot do is give themselves a transplant or any number of complicated medical solutions to life threatening diseases and injury. Comparing the production of goods and the profiteering of people's misery is disingenuous at best and callous stupidity at worst. In addition, I will absolutely demonize people that decide who gets to live or die based on their ability to pay. We live in a world where insurance companies actively work on denying people coverage for life saving procedures and medicines because it might affect their stock price. Why should some limp dick executive with more money than he could spend in ten lifetimes be allowed to that? It is outrageous to me that people either can't or won't see that by having universal health care is a net positive and would save money in the long run.
Its not a fix-all bandaid though, and it needs to be applied incrementally. Otherwise, you'll have the glaring shortcomings of Obamacare. At the very least, health insurance should be reformed to where it functions like every other kind of insurance. Remove the third-party payers and intermediaries from the process and start to close the gap between patients and providers. Clear the path for inter-state market exchanges. Protect the consumer from pre-existing coverage denials and ageism policies. Any payments that are made are from patient-to-doctor and not patient >> insurance >> ? >> ? >> provider. Prices will be driven down, insurance companies will not be able to afford the back-end premium charges for things like coverage of specialty pharmacies, etc.
A good friend of mine went deep in to debt to buy multiple multi-family buildings in Wisconsin. So far in debt in fact that he was forced to come work with me in Iraq for a while and his wife was forced to run his business and maintain the properties. He bought the properties with the plan to rent them as Section 8, which is the rental assistance program you are speaking of. It was really quite amazing. He always made money at it but that wasn't what was most striking about it to me. It was how he made money at it. He was lucky that the properties cash-flowed when you did the math of what the mortgage was and what the Government would pay monthly for rent. Where he really made the money was in the repairs. You see, as part of Section 8, the Government guarantees that if you maintain the property to their standards, they will pay the repairs for any damage done by their tenants. This is where the money really was. You had to jump through their hoops and get three competitive bids for the repairs and then the Government would cut you a check to have the repairs done. So he would take the money and do the repairs himself then re-rent the property after it passed Government inspection. Good for him, he made money, profit isn't a dirty word, right? Well, the bad part of all of this was listening to how poorly his property was treated by the tenants, how often he had to go in and do random inspections and find his property being destroyed. His words, not mine; but he would state that the tenants didn't care it wasn't theirs and they knew that someone else would pay. As a taxpayer, that bothers me.
My central tenet of this has been the Conservative party of my life simply hasn't made it better. I don't pay lower taxes, I am not more "free", and I'm much more susceptible to things like medical bankruptcy, exploitation by a corporation, terrorist attack, and it's apparent to me that the conservative movement in general is literally pointless. They have no platform to solve our social issues, and run on vague notions of "liberty", tax cuts that somehow almost always accumulate to the wealthy, and increasingly combative moral stances predicated on religious nonsense. They happen to be the party of racism, intolerance and discrimination, and I can't critique them for that, but they increasingly court the fringe elements. Over the course of my adult life, the decline in the economic prospects of the average person can be attributed to, in large (but not universal) swaths, the Republican party. I think making it easier for corporations to make money is a game with losers: us. I'm all for personal responsibility (God knows I could have used unemployment a time or two), but ultimately I'm not seeing it as a handout, I'm seeing it as levelling the playing field. Unions, anti-trust, breaking up monopolies, labor protections (including the fucking minimum wage), health care that functions, etc. are all things that shouldn't be considered entitlements, or some kind of privilege, it should be how things work. Why? Because we've learned our lessons from the alternatives of not having them in the 1930's. Our government should serve the people, not the corporations, and it should function. In engineering, regulation is done to ensure it meets specifications: it's not punitive, and it's likely retroactive to some inane fuckery that should have never taken place to begin with (see: OSHA laws that are terrifyingly specific, because they are literally written in blood). We have proven that people can be convinced to work 7 days a week for absolutely paltry sums by giant corporations and we as a society agreed that's not how we want to live. At a certain point, the government makes quality of life for all better, instead of "liberty" and low taxes for a minute handful. That's fair, that's the price you pay for living in an equal society and if you don't approve, you should join a feudal state or declare yourself king of "Fuckistan". The common ground is I think we collect enough taxes. It's just not done effectively. I think the stats are for single payer, it would be like $420 billion as compared to the $518 billion we're paying now (I can't for the life of me find this link, but there are plenty of stats out there that suggest single payer would be cheaper than our current quagmire). I also think it's far too easy for corporations to wiggle out of paying taxes, and far too difficult for individuals to avoid it. I have no problem paying into Social Security, because I view that as "my" money...eventually. I think funding programs like that will work far more effectively than what we're doing now: why is my check funding the Goddamned F-35? I'm not saying we should convert to Norway, and Christ knows the Democrats are laughably bad. But, I've given this some critical thought, and genuinely tried to be open minded to the Republican platform...and I'm just not seeing it.