MMoore movie SiCKO

[Anonymous]

C-, Social Security and Medicare are clearly socialist schemes.

[Anonymous]

C-, Social Security and Medicare are clearly socialist schemes.

[Anonymous]

sp-, yes, get government out of saving folks (health insurance, AFDC, Social Security, etc.). Let such revert to communities and churches.

If you, cyphire, George Soros, and R- want to finance communal living/anything goes, please do.

Me, I give my money to The Salvation Army and Father Joe, ’cause I think that poor folks probably need bounds put on their behavior (or a safe bed at mental hospital) at least as much as they need a handout.

[Anonymous]

sp-, yes, get government out of saving folks (health insurance, AFDC, Social Security, etc.). Let such revert to communities and churches.

If you, cyphire, George Soros, and R- want to finance communal living/anything goes, please do.

Me, I give my money to The Salvation Army and Father Joe, ’cause I think that poor folks probably need bounds put on their behavior (or a safe bed at mental hospital) at least as much as they need a handout.

[lostkitty]

jg- Uncomfortably numb just wrote this on another thread, but it pertains to your comments on board of directors, etc.

If you had the slightest clue what was going on in health care, you might believe differently. These are extreme times we live in. Your future, your children's future, and theirs' has been mortgaged with the proceeds stuffed into the deep pockets of the few. Those who control are so far removed from the common experience that only the mandate to generate the highest return on capital investment takes priority. In fact, it is illegal for a corporate board to act in any other interest then their shareholders. These are the people who are deciding what kind of health care we are all receiving. Just as the debt bubble is a house of cards and must eventually crumble, so must the illusion that corporations care about your health. Believe me, they couldn't give a sh*t about anything except your $$.

 I sincerely hope that you are not ever faced with a catastrophic illness, and that you remain as healthy as you are today.  But if you, or one of your family members does become ill, you will learn the hard way what it is we are all talking about.  Or, you could just go watch the movie and get some perspective/education, ahead of time.

[lostkitty]

jg- Uncomfortably numb just wrote this on another thread, but it pertains to your comments on board of directors, etc.

If you had the slightest clue what was going on in health care, you might believe differently. These are extreme times we live in. Your future, your children's future, and theirs' has been mortgaged with the proceeds stuffed into the deep pockets of the few. Those who control are so far removed from the common experience that only the mandate to generate the highest return on capital investment takes priority. In fact, it is illegal for a corporate board to act in any other interest then their shareholders. These are the people who are deciding what kind of health care we are all receiving. Just as the debt bubble is a house of cards and must eventually crumble, so must the illusion that corporations care about your health. Believe me, they couldn't give a sh*t about anything except your $$.

 I sincerely hope that you are not ever faced with a catastrophic illness, and that you remain as healthy as you are today.  But if you, or one of your family members does become ill, you will learn the hard way what it is we are all talking about.  Or, you could just go watch the movie and get some perspective/education, ahead of time.

[speedingpullet]

So…let me get this straight….

..allow the Church to regulate every part of our lives, even if you’re not a Christian.

Allow ‘communities’ to decide who meets their standard of ‘reasonableness’ in order to give non-taxpayers help.

What exactly do you mean by ‘communities’?

Do these ‘communities’ have to be Christian?

Or can other faiths get a shoe-in too?

How about those who don’t profess to any religion?
(I guess they’ll have to join the Church to get any help, eh?)

Where will these Churches and communities get the money to help non-taxpayers?

Are you suggesting that the Government should siphon off the money already being paid, by you, as a tax-payer into these programs?

Or are you suggesting that taxpayers should just pay as much as they think they should? Or nothing, depending on their outlook. After all these are non-taxpayers and have no rights under the law anymore.

Who would oversee this glorious mosaic of ‘churches and communities’ to make sure that the ‘Alms For The Poor’ actually get to where they are meant to go (and not in the pocket of some unscrupulous pastor for his personal embellishment)?

Or, would it just be up to the particular church/community to decide how much, and to whom, help and money should go to?

Please, I’m all ears. I’d love to know how this would work on a detailed level.

[speedingpullet]

So…let me get this straight….

..allow the Church to regulate every part of our lives, even if you’re not a Christian.

Allow ‘communities’ to decide who meets their standard of ‘reasonableness’ in order to give non-taxpayers help.

What exactly do you mean by ‘communities’?

Do these ‘communities’ have to be Christian?

Or can other faiths get a shoe-in too?

How about those who don’t profess to any religion?
(I guess they’ll have to join the Church to get any help, eh?)

Where will these Churches and communities get the money to help non-taxpayers?

Are you suggesting that the Government should siphon off the money already being paid, by you, as a tax-payer into these programs?

Or are you suggesting that taxpayers should just pay as much as they think they should? Or nothing, depending on their outlook. After all these are non-taxpayers and have no rights under the law anymore.

Who would oversee this glorious mosaic of ‘churches and communities’ to make sure that the ‘Alms For The Poor’ actually get to where they are meant to go (and not in the pocket of some unscrupulous pastor for his personal embellishment)?

Or, would it just be up to the particular church/community to decide how much, and to whom, help and money should go to?

Please, I’m all ears. I’d love to know how this would work on a detailed level.

[Anonymous]

sp-, look to America before The New Deal. Did you ever read de Tocqueville? Fascinating.

America before The New Deal was a land of low taxes. The Feds did not pay for an NIH, Social Security/Medicare, NCLB, etc. Largely, the Feds paid for a small defense force which shrunk in peacetime.

Unbelievable but true: in ’29, the Feds spent $0.9B on defense and $0.8B on everything else (2% of GDP); state and local governments spent $7.6B (7% of GDP) (GDP was $104B).

Today, Feds spend 7% of GDP (3X) and state and local governments spend 12% of GDP (2X).

With the money not paid in taxes to the Feds or state, you could move to a community that fitted your morals (if you have any — ha, ha) and mores, and support it with your contributions.

It need not be Christian nor even religious. Our Constitution provides for, and protects, both.

Kind of funny, that there’s a nudist colony in East County, founded in the ’20s, where families lived. That’s America of the old days; live and let live. Sure, you have to put up with protest signs from Temperance Union and Pro-Life folks. Big deal.

That’s what we’ll return to after government spending collapses during the upcoming depression.

[Anonymous]

sp-, look to America before The New Deal. Did you ever read de Tocqueville? Fascinating.

America before The New Deal was a land of low taxes. The Feds did not pay for an NIH, Social Security/Medicare, NCLB, etc. Largely, the Feds paid for a small defense force which shrunk in peacetime.

Unbelievable but true: in ’29, the Feds spent $0.9B on defense and $0.8B on everything else (2% of GDP); state and local governments spent $7.6B (7% of GDP) (GDP was $104B).

Today, Feds spend 7% of GDP (3X) and state and local governments spend 12% of GDP (2X).

With the money not paid in taxes to the Feds or state, you could move to a community that fitted your morals (if you have any — ha, ha) and mores, and support it with your contributions.

It need not be Christian nor even religious. Our Constitution provides for, and protects, both.

Kind of funny, that there’s a nudist colony in East County, founded in the ’20s, where families lived. That’s America of the old days; live and let live. Sure, you have to put up with protest signs from Temperance Union and Pro-Life folks. Big deal.

That’s what we’ll return to after government spending collapses during the upcoming depression.

[blahblahblah]

jg, now we’re starting to get on the same page! It sounds like you’re an old-school libertarian and if the government was really to cut spending across the board as you suggest, I could see lots of things improving. No more subsidies for corn farmers — no more cheap corn syrup to make unhealthy snacks and sodas — no more cheap feed to grow fatty unhealthy cattle — much less type 2 diabetes — much less heart disease — lower health care costs. Lowered “defense” spending — fewer military adventures overseas in 13th century medieval wastelands — less terrorism and blowback.

I still think that a couple of government-managed private non-profit insurance monopolies could be a good thing if you could somehow keep the pigs away from the trough. Canada does it for car and health insurance and it seems to work okay. You could always have private for-profits to get even more coverage if you wanted.

I sometimes think the differences on this board are not as severe as it might seem at first. People just look at the same problems from different angles…

[blahblahblah]

jg, now we’re starting to get on the same page! It sounds like you’re an old-school libertarian and if the government was really to cut spending across the board as you suggest, I could see lots of things improving. No more subsidies for corn farmers — no more cheap corn syrup to make unhealthy snacks and sodas — no more cheap feed to grow fatty unhealthy cattle — much less type 2 diabetes — much less heart disease — lower health care costs. Lowered “defense” spending — fewer military adventures overseas in 13th century medieval wastelands — less terrorism and blowback.

I still think that a couple of government-managed private non-profit insurance monopolies could be a good thing if you could somehow keep the pigs away from the trough. Canada does it for car and health insurance and it seems to work okay. You could always have private for-profits to get even more coverage if you wanted.

I sometimes think the differences on this board are not as severe as it might seem at first. People just look at the same problems from different angles…

[Ash Housewares]

Do those things, lk and your fellow Socialists, and Red Staters like me will be open to discussing broad aid to folks. Without such, it is money down the drain, and you can ‘include us out.’

Since you’re so keen on facts jg, it might interest you to know that you “red staters” receive more federal aid than you contribute in tax revenues.

http://www.newrules.org/drdave/9-spending.html

Looks like your buddies will be the ones begging for aid, not lk and her kind.

[Ash Housewares]

Do those things, lk and your fellow Socialists, and Red Staters like me will be open to discussing broad aid to folks. Without such, it is money down the drain, and you can ‘include us out.’

Since you’re so keen on facts jg, it might interest you to know that you “red staters” receive more federal aid than you contribute in tax revenues.

http://www.newrules.org/drdave/9-spending.html

Looks like your buddies will be the ones begging for aid, not lk and her kind.

[speedingpullet]

Ahhh, jg, you didn’t anwer my questions….never mind. Far be it from me to be anal-retentive about it… 😉

You have a point – America paid less tax back ‘n the day.

Bearing in mind that the America you are referring to was a sleepy, largely argarian, cultural backwater up until WW1. Where people died on the street for lack of decent medical care, and life expectancy was in the high 40’s due to terrible living conditions, illiteracy..and westward expansion was still in the cultural memory of all concerned…those were the days.

That was then and this is now…more people, more fingers in more pies…as much as we’d all like to return to the ‘good old days ‘ of times past, none us us here could really survive it.
You can’t have the “Greatest Country in the World’ without someone, somewhere, paying for it to be so. By all means, rest on your laurels a while, but Greatness costs.

Sounds to me that what you’re suggesting is a form of Anarchy (or is it Libertarianism? i can never distinguish the two).

Nothing wrong with Anarchy as a politcal form – it may surpise you to know that both Trotsky and Stalin considered it as a potential social framework for Russia after the revoloution, before deciding on socailist communism.

You could do no better than read “The Dispossessed” by Ursula le Guin, for a fascinatiing fictional “what-if?” about how Anarchy would work in the ‘real’ world.

Unfortunately, like a lot of other political systems, its great for the Big Picture, but falls somewhat short of perfect for ‘the devil is in the details’ kind of stuff.

Would you, for instance, be willing to stop paying for hospitals, emergency services, education, military , infrastructure of all kinds, simply because they part and parcel of the Government?
Would you be prepared to live with the consequences of cutting off all forms of socialised help, including any form of government support for you and yours?
Would you be able (willing, I’m sure, but able) to protect your family, loved ones and property from any schmoe who took a liking to it/them, bearing in mind that you would get absolutley no help doing it, other than what you can beg, borrow or steal?
How would you deal with national problems like clean water, emissions, pollution, power supples, when America has reverted basically back into small Nation-States?

How would America grow as a nation, socailly, scientifically, industrially, etc… with no ‘grand plan’ to fall back on?
How would you compete with the rest of the world, when your population is trying to survive childhood without decent, modern, nationwide medical care, or struggling to find a teacher that can educate them to a standard where they can compete outside the borders of the USA? .

Or, most importantly, do you really think people are capable of thriving with no supervision at all?

Maybe I’m too cynical, but I don’t think human nature is altruistic enough to trust everyone to be on the same page, at the same time.

Let’s face it, Westerners are having enough trouble living under captialism without freaking them out by giivng them the ‘total freedom’ to do as they please.
There are a lot of predators out there (and not just non-taxpayers, either) who would do a number on a lot of people, and wthout laws and institutions in place to curb them, you’ll get Anarchy in the derogatory sense, rather than the political sense.

So – if that’s too grim a scenario, what kind of ‘government’ do you allow in order to stop total social decay?
How do you balance needing some form of nationwide oversight with the need to be self-sufficient? How self sufficient can you be and still have meaningful dealings with the rest of the planet? Wheres the perfect balance, the ultimate point of inflection?

I’m not getting at you, i’m genuinely interested.

Like everyone else, I don’t want to pay taxes, and want to change the way things are. But I have difficulty imagining a way that would work – for the benefit of the majority of people and not for the benefit of a minority – that would be radically different from the political system we have now.

Anyway, I have things to see and people to do 😉

I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, truly.

[Author]

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