Sarcasm, what sarcasm. Seems you received an accolade before the dressing down, but maybe I was wrong and the accolade was unwarranted.
Here in Seattle private nonprofit high school tuition is $20K per year. Four years of that would be $80k if college cost no more than high school. But, there is no chance of that due to living costs, higher and more book costs, the costs associated with serious STEM programs, the requirement for instructor qualifications, personal computer and required software costs, etc, etc, etc. Those who pitvh college as too expensive just aren't thinking - both in terms of what is required to be a college and what benefit it provides to graduates and to America as a whole. And, yes, other nations are planning on leading the world economy, while we are trying to cut education.
Come to Europe, we'll show you how to implement a postsecondary educational program at a national level that is nearly free, gratis and for nothing. You don't ask how much it costs to maintain a firefighting force when your house is burning, do you? Well, that is exactly the question you should be putting to the necessity of a National Tertiary Education Program that is accessible to the sizable number of American students who don't even bother to seek a vocational-training in the US. As I never tire of explaining: *We graduate in the US from high-school about 84% of all secondary-school students. *Of all such students, we graduate only about 60% of rest who seek a Tertiary-level degree that would allow them the skills/competencies necessary for most higher-level paying jobs today. *Multiply those two numbers and you get the total percentage (around 50%) of our young-adult men-and-women who are seeking work annually in the Labor Market without the qualifications necessary for a "decent job" in America. Which should also lead you to the question, "Why are there so many unmarried young women with children without a postsecondary degree?" They are having babies that will likely also not have either a secondary- or tertiary-level academic degree. From Child Trends - excerpt: 'Nuff said ... ?
And many EU nations offer meaningful employment career training in secondary education and these lead into often good apprenticeship programs and other options out of favor in the US.
The best of them all is German apprenticeship programs, so good that French educational authorities ask the Germans to explain how they run the programs. Anyone entering the program obtains a minimum wage (and it is not the ramshackle $7 an hour as in the US) and free schooling in any number of apprenticeship programs. For the schooling, the facilities and teachers are provided by the state. For the OJT-work, they are assigned to various companies throughout Germany. The program lasts two-yeas and works so well that 95% of the students obtain a definitive job-offer from the company where they apprenticed. More here: Why Germany Is So Much Better at Training Its Workers - excerpt: And a How To Do It pdf (in English) written by a German who knows the program well: Germanys dual vocational training system: a model for other countries? Important caveat from the Introduction to the document:
What you are is yet another Inbred Rightist who thinks he is living in an ex-British "colony" and answers to no one except perhaps an elected governor - and most certainly NOT to any political institution that might be considered a UNITED states of America run by a Congress, PotUS, and Supreme Court in a place built on ancient marshland called "DC". Wakey, wakey - the fit has hit the shan in LaLaLand ...
Amen. We have too many who disdain our universities as hotbeds of opposition, unrest, lies, and evil. The same extends to our public debate, where too many citizens can't detect blatant nonsense. The result is that we are dumbing down America while at the same time the world is moving toward competition in fields requiring tertiary education. This is on a scale that is a threat to America.
I would say you are not arguing at all, just spewing forth so many talking points with no real meaning and I would suggest you indeed learn history. Your little fable on communism has nothing to do with reality. As for capitalism, you do not seem to even basically understand the concept much less be able to analyze it. Denial, yes you are in denial. The climate always changes and Darwinism has been proven to be one big hoax much like Al Gore. Capitalism growing China, in what world?
Pot meet kettle. It's historical fact. Saying it doesn't make it true. I can only lead you to water, you must decide to drink. If you choose not to, I can't help you. /facepalm.
Free, there is no such thing as free. If you didn't pay for it then someone else did, normally at the point of a gun. [video=youtube;LK2ZbbWKXWM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LK2ZbbWKXWM[/video]
Rand Paul is a moron. Saying you have the "right to healthcare", is not the same as saying you have the right to force someone to provide it. That is a false dichotomy. This is the United States, when the government provides healthcare it purchases it with dollars and there are plenty of doctors willing to take those dollars, voluntarily, in trade for services no one needs to be conscripted or forced at a point of a gun.
not true of course. Without liberal gun violence people would not pony up to pay for someone else's health care. LIberalism is based on govt violence and always more and more of it.
no someone with liberal communist political beliefs like the professor at Brown. Whats so hard about that?
You are name-calling without the slightest bit of evidence. Besides, if someone is a communist what skin is it off your back. Debate the issues and STOP the childish muckraking. You are NOT in kindergarten here - it's a Debate Forum. Save the mudslinging for your bar-friends. That's what's wrong ...
I'm not sure you understand his argument or what he means by rights. Paul is talking about rights in the Enlightenment sense. Rights that are innate to people. That has nothing to do with free goods and services. Your government can pass a law saying "healthcare is a right" and then procedure to pay for, or more accurately, force other people to pay for healthcare for everyone. But that's not a human right, just a law. The law guarantees healthcare through the VA for people with a service related disability or medical condition, but lots of time all they get is stuck on the waiting list. But there is no innate human right to healthcare.
Few thoughts. No one is forced to pay for anything. The government does not tax in order to pay. The government taxes for several reasons, but none of those reasons are to make it possible for the government to have and spend money. We can revisit this claim if you wish. As far as rights. I agree with you, there is no innate right to healthcare, for that matter, there is no innate right to anything. Now were leaving economics and traveling into the land of philosophy. As far as I'm concerned there are no such thing as "objective rights" or "natural rights". There are only the rights that groups can convince each other to support and enforce. How do we know what constitutes good rights from bad ones? Easy, look at the outcomes they produce and measure them. Convince those around you why some outcomes are more desirable than others and choose. The government doesn't have the right to tax you, the people that created the Consitution and the people that ratified it, agreed that the government can tax you, that is, they choose, to allow it on the grounds that they were convinced it was necessary. The brilliance of the Constitution (and it's inherent flaw) was to convince people they had "rights" endowed to them. This is because it was too difficult to explain that rights should be based on positive outcomes which are based on the evidence. Screw it, just tell people they have rights "endowed" to them. Convince people their rights were "given" to them rather than making them understand that everyone has a part to play in understanding the value in caring about some ideas over others and how to empirically measure them so that as a group we can realize the best possible outcomes in a world filled with competing ideas, ideologies, religions etc.... Far as healthcare, you won't hear me claim that healthcare is a "right". That's an emotional argument. It's like declaring war on drugs or poverty. Purely emotional arguments meant to sway people emotionally rather than based on facts and evidence. If I were going to argue "free" healthcare I'd argue on (at least) 2 grounds. 1) Providing healthcare to everyone results in a stronger nation. (This is something we can measure empirically) 2) Providing healthcare to everyone won't cost the people of the US anything*** (Take care when reading that, I didn't say that it won't cost anything, I said it won't cost the people anything, to the contrary, providing healthcare. (again another fact that can be proven empirically - albeit not easily) This is why economics is my politics, because anything worth doing takes the money and, in this country, people don't understand what they can achieve with the money system we have. For example, the neo-liberals believe that you have to take money from people in order to pay for things. That's 100% wrong. The government doesn't tax in order to have money. It's a complete non-sequitur. But just like convincing people they are "given" rights, telling people that taxes pay for things is an easier and more intuitive way to explain things to the general public. ***The real costs are measured in real resources, not dollars.
Well you seem to understand the difference between Paul's enlightenment rights and the modern free goods and services rights via legislation just fine then.
I beg to differ. There is no innate right to life, but if you take it from me the police will be asking you some questions. Yes, it is that precious. So, one might think that if it is that precious, it should be a governmental objective to preserve it. Not in the US. Americans are literally "eating themselves to death". It takes a while, but that is the ultimate effect of obesity. And it is thought, given the high-rates of obesity in the US, that the lack of immediate attention is one reason why life-spans are so much more reduced in the US. (On average, three-years less than the US. See for yourself here.) Moreover, America's ObamaCare is not "governmental care" because it is still based upon private-industry insurance - one of the reasons that it is so damn expensive. From the above infographic: $8000 per American men, women and children vs half that here in France. And, what must be spent on the ignominiously costly privatized-healthcare (that benefits not only Insurance Companies but those practicing medicine) cannot be spent elsewhere - like giving our kids a decent post-secondary education? Some point differences between the two Healthcare Systems, one the US, the other European: *A GP in the US earns $190K. In France they earn $90K, less than half as much. You might ask why they are paid so poorly. Well, it aint that "poor". In the US, a GP is getting (gross) just a bit less than 4 times the national average income. In France, that same GP is getting 2.5 times as much. (And s/he too tools around in a Mercedes!) *And yet, studies show that EU HealthCare is still better all-round than the American variety, namely because it is more "universal". Before ObamaCare 16% of Americans (about 50 million Yanks) had no healthcare coverage whatsoever. *And now the Replicants want to take that coverage away from them? It's crazy - Americans NEED healthcare much more than Europeans, and here is an entire Replicant Party that wants to undo ObamaCare. Yep, it's crazy ...
This is a weird post. First, the quote from me, when I click on it, takes me to this comment: Not the "Quote" that you have attributed to me: * So I have to wonder, why would you purposefully alter a quote of mine? I believe that's a violation of the rules. Secondly, your response doesn't have anything to do with either my real quote, or the one you cobbled together for me. If you just wanted to speechify, why not just do it rather than alter a quote by me to pretend you are replying to something I've said? * I've said something similar in this thread, so I'm unclear why you would alter a totally unrelated quote. Why not use the real one?
Let's say that was aimed at me with respect to the question you posted. What does any of that have to do with rights?
The government creates dollars, it doesn't take dollars from people to pay for things. The idea that taxes pay for things is both a false Liberal and Conservative belief. What are taxes for? Here is the Fed Chairman in 1943 laying it out (5th page down left hand column) Taxes serve an entirely different purpose, several in fact, but none of the reasons that government taxes are so that it can have the dollars it can already create. And if that's true, Libertarians are out of excuses.
What ever you want it to mean. I don't follow "threads" on each forum. I respond to a post as I read it - when you may have written it as a response to another post. That's one of the problems of forum sites like this one.
Why are you so painfully vague? You said it, care to explain? Ok but I wrote a post about rights or the objective lack thereof and you responded with "whatever I want it to mean". I don't want what you write to mean anything, all I want is for you to explain it. The only problem I see is that you say things and don't adequately defend your statements. In this case, you attributed something I wrote to someone else.
I partially agree with you. The US tax system is abysmally incoherent and unjust on both ends. The system of deductions and special rules makes the process of determining one's tax more complex than is necessary, which ends up bloating the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and prevents it from focusing on tax collection and enforcement. Worse yet, it makes it even more difficult for Congress to estimate income as a way to establish a budget by determine the expenditure ceiling. Moreover, it creates advantages for the upper class at the expense of the middle class, advantages for parents at the expense of those who choose not to reproduce, etc. ad nauseum. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) means some people receive a larger refund than they paid in, which is a foolish way to run an income stream, and is paid for by the middle class. Whatever social welfare system a government runs should be downstream from the tax system, not tied into it. Again, it makes it more difficult to develop a budget and ensure expenditures are equal or less than government tax revenues. The EITC is also a problem because no government should ever pay people to be residents of the nation, as if being breathing is a service provided to the rest of the population. Moreover, it makes the recipient an automatic expense, rather than an asset, a position even more tenuous than being merely expendable. One of the benefits of taxation is that it reminds governments that they depend on their populations. Everyone, every man, woman and child should owe a minimum tax of a dollar per year, primarily as a way to demonstrate integration into the nation, contribution to the corporate good, and verifiable right to participate. If you paid for your seat, then nobody can argue that you do not deserve to stay and watch the show. I am a believer in a slant tax system where there are no deductions, loopholes, etc., but that is graduated, so the more prosperous (who are able to take more advantage of the nation's goodness) pay a progressively larger percentage of their income in tax. Under a certain income, each individual (regardless of age) pays $1 per year, and then as income increases past that minimum income, the tax increases. The tax form would be less than one page, most of which would be personal identifying information. It would take ten minutes or less to complete one's taxes. The resulting efficiencies that would enable the IRS to focus on collection and enforcement (instead of auditing) would decrease the cost of tax collection, and increase the ability to ensure a higher percentage of taxes would be collected. This would create a net increase in tax revenues, assuming the graduated rates were appropriately set. The problem with health care access in the US is due to cost of care being out of control. Privatized Health Insurance is overused, and Obamacare made health costs to individual higher, because the use of Health Insurance companies encourages medical care costs to rise. The use of negotiated rates (between insurance companies and care providers) for medical services hides what the provider is being paid for the service. This prevents customers (patients) from being able to shop for a better deal. The result is a lack of competition among care providers. Without the competition, there is no incentive to provide higher quality services for lower prices, to create tiers of service, or to develop efficiencies. Moreover, the hidden price structures enable health care providers to engage in shameless profiteering, unnecessarily raising prices for catastrophic health events like cancer, kidney failure, heart attacks, etc.. Government-provided social services infantilize the population, fragment the society, and unreasonably increase government power over the population. When people view being taken care of as a right, they are less likely to try hard to support themselves, less likely to be careful with their decisions, less likely to be innovative in developing survival strategies, and less likely to develop communities for mutual support. Because the government bestows the help as a right, recipients stop being grateful to the taxpayers who work to support them. Moreover, in the US this has led to an inflation of what is considered to be "poverty"; a fat poor person with a mobile phone and a car is no longer considered to be a contradiction in terms. The resulting rise standard of living of those receiving services, combined with any rise in tax rates creates resentment and exacerbate class divisions. Worse yet, those class divisions are based on actual lists of people who are specifically defined as expenses, not an assets. . As the rate of dependence on government institutions grows, the government officials have a decreasing incentive to be responsive to the needs of the populace for things like infrastructure and defense, or for protecting basic freedoms and privacies.
