[livinincali]

I think it was inevitable that the fed would just go ahead and say the economy is better whether it was or not when they need to tamper due to the increasing size of the balance sheet. I think they really don’t want to get the balance sheet to big because at some point they lose credibility if it gets too high. Therefore they will say they see the economy as better, continue with tampering, regardless of whether the economy is ready for it or not. The stock market has already proved it’s never going to be ready for tampering, so either they QE forever and eventually lose control of the currency or they tell the insiders and bring about a stock market crash.

The fed is only good at one thing and that is creating bubbles. The bubble this time is in stocks. When it pops is anybody’s guess.

[livinincali]

[quote=joec]I can’t say I know at all how this bit coin works…Can someone summarize how one farms or get bit coins? I watch bloomberg a lot and they were saying how since there is a finite amount, some people may just end up buying it to hold instead of using it for commerce. The lack of stability in this thing makes it extremely limited in use if you have to worry about currency fluctuations…[/quote]

Bitcoins are a crypto currency. Basically mining bitcoins is producing solutions to increasing complexity hashing algorithms. In the early days one might be able to mine multiple bitcoins on a personal PC in a day now it might take a super computer a week to produce one. At this point each bitcoin that is mined might be worth less than the electricity and depreciation associated with producing it.

It’s works much like a ponzi scheme in that those that started at the top/beginning win and those that get in late lose. Somebody that spent $1 to buy bit coins 3 years ago might get $100K today because of the increased demand and limited supply but that increased demand works only for as long as you have an exponential pool of suckers to sell to.

[livinincali]

[quote=CA renter]
Because the PRIVATE publishing and education companies make billions of dollars every year from changes to the curriculum. You didn’t actually think the almost yearly curriculum/textbook changes were “for the children,” did you?

Those “education experts” you’re talking about? They work for PRIVATE CORPORATIONS. It’s a very lucrative business.

Of course, the uninformed yokels will try to blame these changes and the agenda-driven curriculum on the teachers and those “evil unions,” as they always do whenever something goes wrong in the public sector (and they are wrong almost 100% of the time).
[/quote]

Who makes the decision to contract/hire said private corporations? Somebody within public sector does make that decision. Whether private companies lobbied them or not the blame lies on the decision making individuals within the public sector.

[livinincali]

I think the problem is we’re paying a room full of education experts to come up with with new reading assignment that are more politically correct every year. Why can’t we use the reading assignments from last year or 5 years ago. The basics of reading comprehension and math haven’t changed in centuries.

[livinincali]

[quote]
Nobody is saying universal (single payer) systems are without their faults, but no one is denied health care. Budgets are trimmed, waste is slashed, and taxes go up, but health care still remains a fundamental right. Under a free market system, you are at the mercy of a corporation. You have no guarantees so it is the policy holders who get pushed out of the system.
[/quote]

In some cases you are denied health care in single payer system. See most elective surgeries in single payer countries. You could wait years to get a hip replacement and could die before received one. I suppose we can say you were in the queue so you weren’t denied but effectively you were. You didn’t get the surgery you wanted/needed for an improved quality of life before your life ended. The same is true under a capitalistic system if you don’t have the money for a hip replacement you don’t get one either.

Single payer is essentially a price control system. Since there is only one payer of services, the single payer sets the price for each service. You could implement price controls without single payer. We all know what tends to happen in price controlled systems. There usually ends up being shortages because the price is artificially lowered.

[livinincali]

[quote=flu]
Don’t you think that is kinda ironic, considering the entire purpose is to tax the rich more where as wealth accumulation by rich(er) people have been more rampant via capital gains versus “wage” income?[/quote]

Our current tax code is more about social engineering than attempting to fairly collect revenue to run the government. We want people to buy houses, have kids, invest in new businesses, encourage consumption, etc. Therefore we create all kinds of tax codes to encourage people to do things they might not otherwise do. Just tax all gross revenue streams the same and if you want, do it progressively. Taxing consumption would likely be the most fair way but it’s more difficult to tax consumption progressively.

[livinincali]

[quote=Jazzman]
Under a universal system everyone contributes. If everyone abuses or over-uses, they’ll soon tire of the long lines.

Single payer solves the rising costs of infinite demand problem via rationing.
What rationing is that? It is the opposite; giving greater access to care as opposed to discriminatory, selective care.

A free market system would solve that problem via competition of providers.
Yes? Look where it has led.
[/quote]

There’s a limited number of medical services available to everybody. Whether you decide to provide those services on the ability to pay, or waiting in line you still have a selective process in who gets the services when they want them.

The current medical system isn’t a free market. there’s plenty of anti competitive laws passed by congress to limit competition in providing medical services. Go try to open a MRI center in San Deigo and charge $500 a patient. You’ll never make it through the licensing and regulation process because those with existing MRI center lobbied to put up those barriers to entry in the name of safety. Go try to buy cheaper prescription drugs in Mexico and import them to the US.

All of these things make health care more expensive and single payer doesn’t do anything to solve those problems of higher costs here than anywhere else. Who opens a new hospital or clinic if the single payer doesn’t pay enough to keep the doors open. Do medical services providers open more facilities or less facilities under a single payer system. I see single payer pushing more providers out of the system and fewer services available to those in the single payer system. The next step will be to create government providers of services and/or forcing providers of medical services to accept single payer no matter what.

Why not focus of the problem of cost by encouraging more supply of medical services via competition. Why not force users of medical services to shop around for better prices and/or decide that some test/treatment isn’t worth it. That’s the way you address the cost problem.

[livinincali]

I think the first question to ask would be do you really need the addition refrigerator space. If you do you’d probably want a refrigerator that’s of a size where’d you keep that additional space mostly full. A full fridge is more efficient than an empty fridge, especially the more times you open it.

[livinincali]

[quote=joec]
I don’t know if the costs would actually be 12% of someone’s salary, but it seems like if EVERYONE working was forced to pay into the system, companies would be more than happy to just dump all their health care plans (they pay a TON) already and just find a percentage where it’s sustainable and still profitable for hospitals/doctors, etc…

Maybe that’s 12%, maybe 5%, but that seems a ton cheaper than what companies spend probably. I’ve heard companies would good benefits spend over 10k per employee. It could be taken from employee count, but that would make companies less likely to hire if it was a high per employee fee.
[/quote]

Many companies offering health insurance probably do spend close to 10K per employee. The question is if we removed that burden from the employer and put in on the employee via some type of income tax would you expect the companies to give the employee the cost saving in wages or would the companies attempt to keep that cost savings in profits. Obviously if the companies keep that savings in profits all employees will be worse off.

The fundamental issue is there’s virtually unlimited demand for medical services and tests if you don’t have to pay for it. Single payer solves the rising costs of infinite demand problem via rationing. A free market system would solve that problem via competition of providers. Of course single payer does have the problem that you don’t necessarily attract the best and the brightest to become doctors because your single payer system has limited their compensation package. The best and brightest still might become doctors but they won’t be available to the users of the single payer system. They’ll exist outside of the system treating those that can afford to pay supplemental coverage.

[livinincali]

Obamacare is certainly the worst of all possible solutions. Doing nothing would likely have been better although those with pre-existing conditions do see a benefit under Obamacare. Obamacare is a throw more money at it solution to a problem that is being caused by exponentially growth in costs. Just removing some of the anti-competitive laws, like re-importation of drugs and opening up the licensing of more diagnostic testing centers (i.e. why does it cost so much more to have an MRI today than it did when the machine was invented, even though the technology is the same) would reduce costs more so than the ACA.

Let’s just say we do go with single payer and we limit costs to 10% of GDP which seems to be around many of the other socialized medicine country. So we decide we’re going to spend 1.5 trillion on health care. So then we need to decide what we’re going to tax to pay for that 1.5 trillion. Let’s say we use income tax to fund 2/3 of that 1.5 trillion or 1 trillion dollars. We’ll get the other 500 billion from corporate taxes, co-pays, and maybe some kind of wealth tax. What would that mean for your paycheck. Well there’s about 8 trillion dollars in income that subject to tax each year. So that would mean 1/8 = 12.5% tax rate to your paycheck to pay for single payer health care. That’ about 10% more than you’re currently paying for medicare/medicaid. You really think big corporation providing health care are going to bump your salary up the amount they used to contribute for health care or do you think they’ll keep most of that to pad their profits?

[livinincali]

If you’re willing to spend the time and energy to level a lawn you might want to consider the time and money for a grey water reclamation system.

[livinincali]

[quote=no_such_reality]There’s several reasons.

First thing we need to address is that per capita, the USA across it’s levels of Government is currently and has for the last five years been spending on par with GReat Britain, France and Germany. We haven’t taxed to that level, but per person, we’re spending the same level of Government.

Except we don’t have universal health care, SS is kind of like their pensions, but overall, we’ve been funneling our money into the Military.

When you look at Norway, firstly, their top tax rate is 48%, their GDP per capita is twice ours, with a GDP at basically $100K/person.[/quote]

We have universal health care for 119 million people in this country (medicare and medicaid) at a cost of $940/119 = $7,899 per person on the program. Most industrialized nations provide health care for about $3,500-5,550 per capita. http://kff.org/global-indicator/health-expenditure-per-capita/

The real big problem is the total cost of providing medical care is this country. The key is figuring out how to provide medical care for less not figuring out how to get more people to help pay for the exorbitant costs.

[livinincali]

[quote=The-Shoveler]States that Give more to Fed Gov than they get.
Top 10
New Jersey, Nevada, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Illinois, Delaware, California, New York, Colorado.

Interestingly Texas for instance now gets more Fed money than it gives as of 2012.[/quote]

I’ve always thought these statistics are somewhat misleading because once you look at some of details you see some flaws. For example Delaware leads in net revenue coming in but why? Well that’s because Delaware corporate law is very favorable so there’s tons of corporations that base their operations in Delaware pay their taxes from Delaware but are actually operating somewhere else.

District Of Columbia is never mentioned as a taker state because it’s not a state but it has the biggest net taker status for obvious reasons.

New York and New Jersey benefit from being the Financial capital of the world and the masters of the nation’s money supply but in the event of a US country split could they really maintain that position.

The west coast has a fairly dynamic economy so maybe we’d fair better than other parts of the split US but out biggest concern would be securing energy. Although we’d probably be in better shape than the east coast in securing trade with Mexico and Canada for energy supplies.

[livinincali]

dup

[livinincali]

[quote=The-Shoveler]Maybe it’s time to agree to disagree and split the country into three for four smaller ones.

I can see all the west coast states as one separate country.[/quote]

The east coast could never let that happen. New York/Washington DC are heavily driven by managing the money and government for the rest of the country. If they didn’t have a monopoly on the money supply they’d be broke in a heart beat. The center of the country is where all the food and gas come from for the east coast.

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