Why are we a divided Nation?

220 bucks a month for 5 years.

I am the poor you are talking about.

 

Forcing your opinion on what is foolish is a big reason we are divided. Personally, I think consuming government subsidized foods until you're sick enough to start consuming government subsidized pharm products is foolish.

 

Its very big of you to admit that your system is inadequate. Your opinion on what is superior is fine up until its forced on others. Personally, I think my system is superior. I stay healthy and only see a doctor once every 2 years. I broke a bone snowboarding 15 years ago and my insurance covered it.

 

I live in Los Angeles and put 5 kids through school. 2 of them were being threatened with being held back a grade. I put them in a non-union, charter school and both graduated early. Competition is good for students, but the unions strongly oppose it.

SS forcefully confiscates the workers money, pays poor returns, and keeps the workers money when they pass away. Its a good deal for politicians.

 

First and foremost, wealth tax. Nobody said it was unconstitutional he said it was a good idea. It is a stupid idea.

 

So you took this one quote from the article and then ignored the whole substance of the rest of it. The very next paragraph reads:

"The new study can't definitively answer that question, but Boyd, the senior author, says it points in that direction.

"Immigrants' expenditures for health care are much, much less than native borns'," he says. "What that means is they are subsidizing U.S. health care. Our data are very clear that the more immigrants we have in any insurance pool, the healthier that insurance pool will be financially."

He concedes it's true for Medicare, the federal program for the elderly and disabled. "We think about 55 percent of illegal immigrants pay into Medicare through payroll deductions," Camarota says. "So they're a net benefit to the program, with one very important caveat — they've got to stay illegal. Otherwise they'll eventually add to the insolvency of Medicare."

For younger immigrants the net gain/drain situation is less clear. Camarota says immigrants over age 18 are much more likely to be on Medicaid. But it's not known whether their lower medical expenditures are enough to offset their greater enrollment.

"On balance, my opinion is immigrants are a net drain on the publicly financed part of our health care system," Camarota says. "But it may not be as big a drain as some people imagine."

Boyd says he doesn't expect the new analysis to change many people's entrenched conceptions about the burden that immigrants pose to the nation's social networks. "Any single piece might convince only a few people to change their minds," he says. "But if people start seeing it over and over, maybe it will start to sink in. It's a Sisyphean task."

Meanwhile, I'll repost the abstract from the actual study Boyd is citing:

"Abstract
In health care policy debates, discussion centers around the often-misperceived costs of providing medical care to immigrants. This review seeks to compare health care expenditures of U.S. immigrants to those of U.S.-born individuals and evaluate the role which immigrants play in the rising cost of health care. We systematically examined all post-2000, peer-reviewed studies in PubMed related to health care expenditures by immigrants written in English in the United States. The reviewers extracted data independently using a standardized approach. Immigrants’ overall expenditures were one-half to two-thirds those of U.S.-born individuals, across all assessed age groups, regardless of immigration status. Per capita expenditures from private and public insurance sources were lower for immigrants, particularly expenditures for undocumented immigrants. Immigrant individuals made larger out-of-pocket health care payments compared to U.S.-born individuals. Overall, immigrants almost certainly paid more toward medical expenses than they withdrew, providing a low-risk pool that subsidized the public and private health insurance markets. We conclude that insurance and medical care should be made more available to immigrants rather than less so."

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0020731418791963

These figures are not from any study I cited and you have not posted a link. Can you substantiate these figures? Particularly the one where 70% of families are on food stamps. Thanks.

Already paying a top rate of 37%??? These are historic lows. How much lower do you want to go. You are already running a 21T deficit and counting while residing over the largest upward transfer of wealth in history. And yes, the Tax Foundation study on effective rate of top 1% is quite famous and has been discussed on other sites. Can you think of what is different between now and then????

The difference is this. There were virtually no households in the 1% in the 50's who came anywhere the kind of wealth that the !% commands today. Precisely because of regressive tax policies and stagnant wages for decades, there are virtually no families in the 50's that would have qualified as even close to the wealth the 1% commands today:

"You don’t have to agree with me that the ‘bargaining elasticity,’ to use Piketty, Saez, and their coauthor Stefanie Stantcheva’s term for it, is the operative mechanism explaining why the 1950s rich weren’t as rich as the 2017 rich. Instead you can agree with…. the Tax Foundation, which is well-known for its maintained assumption that high marginal tax rates on the rich cause them to supply less labor and acquire less education since the return to doing so is lower. Greenberg’s inference about effective tax rates in the 1950s is erroneous no matter what impact you think the effective tax rate has on individual behavior, provided it has some effect—which is why it’s strange for an organization like the Tax Foundation to be promulgating analysis that assumes, at least behind the scenes, that taxes don’t affect the decisions that economic agents make.

Greenberg’s mistake is a basic example of the bias that comes from mishandling a selected dataset. There aren’t any households earning $30 million, or $300 million for that matter, in the tax records of the 1950s, so they don’t enter into Greenberg’s analysis. From his selected sample, he draws erroneous conclusions about what their effective tax rate would have been had they been present in the data—that it would have been equal to the effective tax rate of the richest households he does observe. In fact, if they had been in the data, he would have observed a much higher effective tax rate than the one he inferred for them.

The great economist James Heckman taught us that selection bias is a frequent, indeed overwhelming, concern in economics precisely because economic agents are rational and hence their presence in a dataset reflects optimization decisions that they make. In Greenberg’s case, the 2017-style super-rich aren’t in the 1950s data, because they made the decision not to earn 2017-level top incomes, and they made that decision thanks to the exact policy that Greenberg imagines himself to be investigating: their effective tax rate."

https://rooseveltinstitute.org/effective-progressive-tax-rates-1950s/

So Greenburg and the Tax Foundation are trying to compare apples to oranges for the simple reason that there were no households in the 50's or 60's even close to the kind of billionaire wealth inequality we see today.

https://www.cbpp.org/research/feder...ot-represent-typical-households-tax-burdens-3

Reagan took office at the start of an upward swing in the economic cycle. So did Clinton and Trump. This had virtually nothing to do with tax policy though the tax cuts can be looked at like kind of a temporary "sugar rush" for the economy. Presidents lucky enough to be in office during upward trends tend to become mythologized like Reagan while those like Carter who are in office during the opposite are in trouble. Even so, can you provide a link that shows that there has been a substantial increase in investment or entrepreneurial ventures due to tax cuts ( I am sure there has been some change but how substantial) and not just investment in stock buybacks and derivative types of speculation?

And let's not forget that the national debt ballooned to 2.1 T during Reagan's term. Hardly the fiscal conservative and responsible nonsense we are always presented about Republicans who generally leave huge deficits when they leave office. Trump will be no exception and probably he will leave the best and most perfect deficit in history.

You actually have a point on this one. I was just looking at a Pew research study that compared "Cultural Diversity" around the world and not ethnic diversity, so I was mistaken Here is the actual chart I was quoting:



https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-ta...st-culturally-diverse-countries-in-the-world/

So this has to do with different models of immigration between our two countries with the US having a "melting pot" model where immigrants are expected to blend with the dominant culture whereas Canada is more multicultural. There are different ways that StatsCan collects data about racial and ethnic immigrants compared to the US.

So, your figures are not up to date for 2019 but still I should have known that the US has a far higher number of blacks and Hispanics and this would skew data so I apologize for making an incorrect statement.

That being said, you are trying to imply this means it is too costly for the US to implement a Canadian type system. But here is the rub. You have ten times the population and ten times the household wealth with Canada having just over 600B and the US in excess of 6,000B.

So, even though you have a nominally higher rate of non-whites, you have ten times the wealth that we do. So the idea that you cannot afford a decent universal health care system has nothing to do with disparities in ethnic minorities or immigration. - (which Canada has comparable rates for a country of it's size)

And I was not the one who made this a racial argument. You started this discussion by implying that it was poorly educated blacks, Hispanics and immigrants that made Canadian style universal health care impossible in America.

It is not that you don't have the wealth to provide health care to all and improve education and social services..........It's that you don't want to.

 

You say you're poor? Poor people don't have $13,000 to put toward a hospital bill, so what are you talking about?

I'm not kidding about people getting turned away from hospitals. It will happen.

 

last year my wife and I made just under 40,000
this year we will be under 10,000
some hospitals never turn anyone away I don't have 13,000 sitting around that's why i have payments of 220 dollars a month. hell i don't have 1300 lying around

there are plenty of hospitals that by law CANNOT turn people away .

I wasn't asked about my ability to pay until the morning after i was admitted and they knew i had no insurance.

 

Furthermore, there is nothing stopping us (in countries with universal public health) from taking out private health insurance, and wasting a motherload of money on private hospitals and accupuncture. Plenty of people do.

 

I'm sorry for your loss, Renee. Hard time for you. X.

 

But it ISN'T inadequate. It's triaged - the only fair and reasonable approach to medicine, period. Also, I can and do say ours is superior because our outcomes are better. The world doesn't measure medicine by waiting times and private bathrooms, it's measured by health/survival rates. America has some of the worst outcomes in the First World.

 

we are labeled lots of things.people are christians, I’m labeled a feminist, a mother, a wife, a teacher, an atheist

What a disgusting sexist poster...and to say she is a drunk? Repeat ally enough times and fools will believe it

 

I'll give you props here for giving me more than the usual left-wing screaming, "No it isn't!" I come on here for a good argument but rarely get one, so thank you for that. But you're still wrong, muahahahaha.

You still basically ignored my argument, which is that health care is just one cost associated with minorities, and this study only covered the immigrants, which, while being overwhelmingly Hispanic, aren't 100% so. Immigrants are younger and so cost less than older people in terms of health care, but the fact that the health care for most immigrants' children ends up being at state expense makes that come out neutral at best. So they aren't exactly contributing to the health care costs of an aging population. Meanwhile, blacks are native born Americans and cost a great deal in health care expense and aren't included in the study you quote at length. The only area blacks contribute to the public coffers is in Social Security, and the sad but real reason for that is the significantly lower life expectancy of blacks versus whites. White women collect far more than they ever pay in to SS by living to 90 years old while black men never get their money back because they die at 65.

Ta daaaa...


https://cis.org/Report/Welfare-Use-Immigrant-and-Native-Households

Note that 62% of immigrant families on Medicaid, too. That's health care for the poor, and 62% of immigrant families are on it. Back before the 1965 bill, immigrants were forbidden from taking public welfare, and anyone who couldn't support himself was denied entry. Those of questionable means had to have an American sponsor, someone who would vow to support them if they couldn't support themselves. My grandmother sponsored a family from Germany who still kept in contact with her when she died in 1990. What's ironic about that was that my grandmother couldn't even support herself that well.

Ideally, 25% should be the maximum rate. There's no reason anyone should ever have to pay more than a quarter of his or her income to the government. Yes, that's the upper end and not all income gets taxed at the maximum rate, but there are "clawbacks" written into the tax code to eliminate deductions given to those with lower incomes, making more of the wealthy's income subject to the highest rates.

Yes, 50 million immigrants. Having millions of people willing to work for chump change keeps wages at the low end down while not impacting the upper end. There is no transfer of wealth because wealth is created, not transferred, by major corporations. No one is poorer because of Bill Gates' billions, and in fact, we're all richer for having Microsoft Windows than we were without it. The only people who get money through the transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich are lawyers and politicians and bureaucrats, who do nothing but make things worse while collecting healthy chunks of change for themselves. Hunter Biden making $50,000 a month off the backs of poor Ukrainians ought to infuriate you, but you want to get pissed off at Bill Gates, who never took a dime he didn't earn. The deficit is from runaway public spending and not from any lack of tax dollars coming in. Newt Gingrich balanced the budget in the 1990s without cutting a dime from Social Security, an amazing feat, but no one before or since has had Gingrich's fiscal restraint.

You're making my point for me here, that raising tax rates to 90% won't bring in more money, it will just make the rich shield their incomes from the government. There were rich people in the 1950s & 60s, see J. Paul Getty, worth over a billion dollars, but they shielded their income from the government so they weren't subject to the 90% tax rate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealthiest_Americans_(1957)

So presidents have nothing to do with the economy? I'm sure most economists would be surprised to hear you say that. Inflating the money supply was absolutely the decision of the presidents (Nixon and Carter) during the 1970s, and inflating the money supply caused inflation and recession. When Reagan took office, his Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker turned off the spigot on the inflationary money policy, causing the short, sharp recession of 1981-2, and then causing the prolonged economic boom of the rest of the 1980s. Reducing the top rates of income taxation further freed the economy. The Forbes 400 barely changed all during the 1970s, but by 1990, almost the entire list was different from 1980, thanks to a boom in stock investing and entrepreneurship.

The stock market is an imperfect measure of economic performance, and an imperfect measure of investment, but the stock market languished from the Johnson years in the 1960s all the way to 1982 when the Volcker measures and the first round of Reagan's tax cuts took effect. Then the stock market boomed. Then the elder Bush came in and destroyed everything Reagan had done in four short years and caused a minor recession. Then Clinton got elected and after a dismal first two years, a Republican House took control under Gingrich, and from then on, the stock market boomed. Clinton presided over the largest economic boom in history, thanks to Gingrich. It actually went the other way when the younger Bush took office in 2001. Bush II reduced some tax rates but raised others, and government spending went out of control. The stock market did poorly, and a bomb lit during the Clinton years (risky mortgages given to people who couldn't pay them combined with a lessening of the restrictions on bank investments) went off during Bush's reign that wiped out many people's savings. Obama continued many of his predecessor's policies and added to the problem with higher tax rates, but the stock market did well despite the underlying weakness in the economy. (The economy only grew about 1.5% a year under Obama, but the stock market more than doubled. Why?) You can see all this in this interactive chart: https://www.macrotrends.net/2613/stock-market-performance-by-president-from-election-date I don't know why the Johnson administration is not included.

Oh, and here's a measure that is more specific to what you were asking, the number of new business startups. You can see they plummeted during the Carter years and recovered during the Reagan years.


https://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/news/economy/us-startups-near-40-year-low/index.html

 

Had to split this in two pieces to post.

Reagan offered much better budgets than the ones that were passed. While Reagan finally got a Republican Senate in 1985, I think, he dealt with a Democratic House his entire eight years, and the budgets they passed under Tip O'Neill were much worse than the budgets Reagan submitted. So let's not blame Reagan too much for the deficits. Likewise, we can't credit Clinton too much for the balanced budgets that Gingrich passed. On the other hand, Bush II and the Republicans during the 2001-2008 period are 100% to blame for their deficit spending. I was disgusted with the whole lot of them the entire eight years. They finally had a chance to do something about the ballooning national debt, the deficit, the looming Social Security and Medicare mess, and what did they do? Kicked the ball down the road and made things much much worse. Clinton was a model of fiscal restraint in comparison to Bush II, and people called Bush II a heartless conservative. Bullshit. It remains to be seen whether Trump is ever going to get the budget under control. He has one more year or maybe five depending on how 2020 goes. But he certainly isn't doing anything about the existing debt by piling on more. But Obama was as bad or worse than Bush II, so you can hardly describe Democrats as being fiscally responsible.

Gotcha. Thanks for the acknowledgement. I don't really know how they came up with that map. We've got more "cultural diversity" in New York and LA than all of Canada combined. I counted 114 foreign language newspapers in Canada (impressive, actually), 142 in the US, from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Canada#Ethnic_and_multicultural_newspapers and here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categ...age_newspapers_published_in_the_United_States The US has the 2nd largest of almost every population in the world, you name it, they're here. 2nd largest Polish population? In the US. 2nd largest Korean population? In the US. 2nd largest Chinese population? In the US. We have more Nigerians here in the US than there are in the UK, and the UK is known for its Nigerians.

No, we don't have the money. Lily-white Vermont tried to initiate a state-wide health care for all system and they simply couldn't afford it. Having ten times the money but 40x the poor people makes things much more difficult. Best estimate of a Medicare for all system was 9 trillion dollars, 2.5 times the size of our entire national budget now and nearly half the entire GDP of the country (19 trillion). I did my own little study of the historical projected costs of government programs and their eventual costs, including Social Security, Medicare, and a few smaller programs, and the difference between what the OMB projected the costs to be and what the actual costs ended up being was a difference of nine times. So implementing a Medicare for all system in the US is more likely to cost something like 81 trillion dollars, or 4 1/4 times more than the entire US GDP.

"Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin announced on Wednesday that he is abandoning attempts to implement a single-payer health care plan that would have made Vermont the first state in the country to establish a publicly-financed health care system."

[from Shumlin:] "The cost of that plan turned out to be enormous, requiring an 11.5% payroll tax on all Vermont businesses and a public premium assessment of up to 9.5% of individual Vermonters’ income. Further, the phase-in for smaller businesses and those that do not currently offer insurance would add an additional $500 million to the system. These are tax rates that I cannot responsibly support or urge the Legislature to pass. In my judgment, the potential economic disruption and risks would be too great to small businesses, working families and the state’s economy."

https://truthinmedia.com/vermont-abandons-single-payer-health-care-plan/

"But the census determines the unofficial “whitest state” ranking by considering residents classified as both Caucasian and non-Hispanic, of whom Vermont’s percentage is 93.9 percent — barely below Maine’s national high of 94 percent, according to the website www.census.gov."

https://vtdigger.org/2016/01/17/is-vermont-the-whitest-state-in-the-union/

Interesting that part of the funding of that plan was $150 million from federal coffers. When that money didn't come through, they had to abandon the plan. Meaning even if the system had worked as intended, it still wouldn't have been applicable at a nationwide level because of the federal funding.

Edit: By the way, I can make the case for not socializing medicine independent of any cost issues. But cost just makes it impossible, while the philosophical argument is more theoretical.

 

"The poor have been voting Democrat for fifty years and they're still poor." - Sir Charles Barkley

 

http://TheEducationFraud.blogspot.com

Pay particular attention to the graph showing school performance in New York City. The Teachers' Union Charter School ranked at the fifth percentile.
Utter incompetence. The four charter schools run by a billionaire ranked form 86th to 100th percentiles. Q.E.D.

 

Holy crap!! I know what you're trying to do; swamp me with all kinds of right wing mumbo-jumbo hoochy koo hoping I'll give up.

But I like a good argument too.

Trouble is, I'm 60 years old with grandkids and commitments and stuff. Trying to save America from itself has to be something I do in my spare time alas.

So, you want to put this much effort into an argument, no matter how wrong you are, I'm going to take it seriously and give you the honest response this post merits.

Trouble is, it will take me a little time to read through, fact check and respond to your post.

But I think these are the kinds of subtantive, fact-based discussions we should be having on these types of issues which affect us all - so really good post.

I'll be back.......

 

Leftists (all over the Western world) are becoming simultaneously richer, and poorer. The 'very Left' cities are now showing the greatest wealth divide. Conversely, the least Left cities are increasingly showing the least wealth divide. This is a new phenomenon, and it's happening everywhere. It'll undoubtedly get worse, too - given the dramatic rise in homelessness in Lefty cities, and the insane fortunes now being amassed by the elite Left.

So much for equality and justice.

 

Sorry, meant to quote this post.

 

It's a hard question to answer. In some ways as well as others We've been a divided nation since Columbus discovered America. We'll always be a divided nation unless we can come up with solutions that we can deal with.

 

There is nothing hard about it. Just get rid of unconstitutional policies of special priviliges and all people will unite.
But that is what goberment is afraid the most , so they ignite and spread hate.

 

Amazing, isn't it? The most liberal cities have the greatest income inequality, and the worst performance in terms of social outcomes, while conservative run cities are models of progress and prosperity, but they call US the greedy and heartless ones.

 

What a mess.

 

They should be deeply ashamed.

More importantly though, it shows us exactly what happens when Progressives gain power. It demonstrates - emphatically - just how dangerously stupid their ideology is. Almost everything they truck is essentially a variant of 'no responsibility', but they're so deeply stupid that they couldn't predict how that would play out.

 

Another odd thing about Democrats, no sense of shame, no sense of reality that might influence their thinking, no willingness to allow actual results determine their policy positions. It's interesting to watch a Democrat who does his/her research come to realize that the Republicans have been right all along. I'd almost feel sorry for them, but Democrats turned Republicans are some of the most effective spokesmen for the party... Reagan, Dennis Prager, Brandon Straka, Evan Sayet, etc., etc., all were once Democrats. You might even lump Cassie Jaye in there, but I don't know if she actually changed parties or just switched her position on the issue of feminism without letting it affect her other policy views.

I blew my nephew's mind by asking him one day, "How do we know we're right and not just very good at rationalizing?" He's been stuck on that ever since. But I have some actual, real evidence to point to that says I'm right, such as North Korea and South Korea, and most of the actual statistics on social policies back me up. So I'm pretty confident in saying that we're right and not just rationalizing. On the other hand, Democrats have very little in the way of facts, so they have to be very good at rationalizing. It's a little ironic, actually, Democrats tend to be more atheistic or agnostic than Republicans and think they make decisions based on reason rather than faith, but their faith in socialism seems unshakeable regardless of how many dead people you show them.