ClovingWestbrook
Banned
I'd orefer to listen to Beck than Hannity.
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PoliGAF 2013 |OT1| Never mind, Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
- Thread starter ClovingWestbrook
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I'd orefer to listen to Beck than Hannity.
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12812
Pretty interesting Jeremy Grantham interview. The phosphorus bit is pretty disturbing. If he is right about that, hopefully its 70 years and not 50 cause then im fairly positive that I will be dead
Pretty interesting Jeremy Grantham interview. The phosphorus bit is pretty disturbing. If he is right about that, hopefully its 70 years and not 50 cause then im fairly positive that I will be dead
NYCmetsfan
Banned
Are you James Carville? He literally just said this in class. That he's just waiting for that David brooks or friedmen column praising him for leadership and crossing the partisan divided .
He also mentioned Diablosing/bad news for Obama and Democrats habit of it.
airmangataosenai
Member
I think it varies some by branch but in the Air Force you're permitted up to $4.5k for tuition every year. If all Air Force personnel used 100% that would come out to about $1.3 billion a year but obviously very few use the full amount. They also don't pay TA for two degrees at the same level. Only one Associates, one Bachelors, one Masters, one PhD.
In theory compulsory voting should moderate, yes, but the two primary parties here are falling other themselves to cater to the right and overall public satisfaction in political institutions is at an all time low (as it is in the rest of the anglo-sphere).
To the guy that wants a 'none of the above' option, we have nothing obligating you to cast a valid vote. You can get your name checked off the roll and simply leave, or write "eat a bag of dicks cunt" on the ballot (there was a thirty year high of the latter in the last election, backing up my above point).
Black Mamba
Member
Is this sarcastic?
PhoenixDark
Banned
Not talking about means testing SS, I'm talking about Medicare. One could honestly argue we have means testing today in the sense that more affluent people on Medicare do end up paying higher premiums than average citizens, but I would certainly prefer a simpler system with a few premium/deductible thresholds based on income and age. If you're 30 years old and want to buy Medicare, you should be able to; and the costs should be based on your income.
With SS I just want the income cap eliminated, although I'd settle for a compromise where the cap is raised to a higher level.
el retorno
Member
not at all
Where's the beef?
Black Mamba
Member
I'm a bit confused if you were attacking or agreeing with my argument. My guess was the former. lol
Aaron Strife
Banned
I agree on principle but unfortunately Colorado has a constitutional ban on gay marriage, so there's not much they can do until it's repealed. The pro-marriage side deliberately set up the civil unions bill as a temporary measure and the plan is in 2014 they'll repeal the amendment and pass a marriage bill.
Agreeing with the sentiments, clarifying the formal structure.
Dunno if this was posted yet. I'm not really one of the "save the whales" type of liberals, but this crosses a new threshold for scumbaggery:
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/ted-nuge...machine-gun-from-a-helicopter-for-bill-maher/
Ted Nugent said:
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/ted-nuge...machine-gun-from-a-helicopter-for-bill-maher/
el retorno
Member
http://www.salon.com/2013/03/10/can_victoria_jackson_return_from_the_fringe/?source=newsletter
Its a dick move for sure but
Feral hogs are an invasive species and a huge problem in Texas, I have zero problems with hunting them. And he used the meat and help the needy, so yeah, for the first time in history I'm going to agree with the nuge, win win win.
And while there are more manly ways to hunt a feral hog than from a helicopter, I fully understand anyone who wouldn't want to face those fuckers on even footing.
empty vessel
Member
I'm not sure that I understand what you're getting at here, so this comment may not have much relevance to your particular point, but here is the problem with means testing, generally speaking:
That's what the proposed Republican budget does. I support government programs that treat people equally on the benefits side. I also support taxation that isn't tied to benefits at all, i.e., repeal of the payroll tax. This basically accomplishes implicit means testing but avoids explicit means testing. So we create, for example, a highly progressive income tax, with extreme tax rates (80-90%) on extreme incomes (i.e, incomes over $2 million). That means the rich pay more. But then everybody is entitled to the same benefits regardless of wealth or income. Retirement insurance and/or retirement wage should go to everybody equally. Health care should be given to everybody equally. Etc. That seems fair to me, and I think politically stable.
Dr. Pangloss
Member
If we aren't too careful the government may tax skateboarding soon.
You need to stop this. It's not cute or funny. Quit using these red herring fallacies on jamesinclair and now CyclopsRock. If you want to address them, then attack their arguments and not their characters.
And this shit too. Do we stop Cheezmo from voicing an opinion because he is from the UK too? I thought we wanted Poligaf to be more inclusive and attract other opinions.
ClassyPenguin
Banned
SS should not be chained to any tax in my opinion much like many other government benefits, basically what EV said.
I wasn't particularly clear and the example I gave was fucking stupid.
What I was aiming at is that you can create a system that is economically equivalent to a means tested system and it's always going to preferable because you're not building an annoying bureaucracy for it.
speculawyer
Member
Yeah, he's my hero lately. A big Wall Street titan that has analyzed the numbers and come to some sobering conclusions as to resource limits and climate change. So much so that he has created environmental charities and protested the XL pipeline. I'm not so sure protesting the pipeline is effective or a good target but at least he is out there speaking his voice.
And it is all numbers based . . . he is not some guy that had a change of heart and became some environmentalist hippie. He's still a Wall Street financial guy but the numbers told him chilling story.
Here is a PDF with his overall view:
http://www.theravinaproject.org/JGLetterALL_1Q11.pdf
BTW, regarding that phosphorus, he said 50 years if we ignore Morocco. Fortunately we have Morocco. But there are several commodities that are causing problems these days (Copper, oil, iron, rare earths, etc.). Nothing world-threatening but switching to alternatives, dealing with lower grade source materials, requiring more energy input, has made it a very economic difficult time.
empty vessel
Member
I definitely agree with this. Means test on the tax side, but keep the tax code exceedingly simple and progressive (the very meaning of means testing on the tax side). That necessarily means elimination of the payroll tax, which is both regressive and needlessly complicates taxation.
But equality on the benefits side, i.e., all a bureaucrat has to do is to determine whether you're an American citizen that meets the basic requirements (e.g., for retirement insurance, ensuring that the benefits recipient is over 65, 67 for those of us born after 1959 because assholes raised the age instead of lowering it, but we should organize to lower it back down). That's my proposal.
speculawyer
Member
But does he need to be such a dick about it? If he said what you said, it wouldn't be much of a deal. But the way he takes glee in killing mammals. That is kinda sadistic.
BTW, the UK has a bloated deer population and they'll probably need to do a culling soon. I'm sure that will raise a lot of ire but when a population is out of control, either we can cull it or it will just suffer its own overshoot & crash.
Ultimately, that will apply to humans as well but hopefully we can manage the population just through reduce birth rates only. Otherwise they'll be an overshoot crash (starvation) or culling (probably through resource wars).
Because then there wouldn't be a Huffington Post article about him.
More than probably any country in the world, the US is a proof that hunting can be used for conservation and preservation.
No.
Well, at least unless we figure out immortality, and fuck that, I hope I'm dead before that happens.
Co-signed.
speculawyer
Member
I don't know how you can last 15 minutes. I just get so angry. Angry that people can listen to such tripe and not notice that it contradicts itself.
I can think of a few reasons, I guess. I should say up front that if we're talking about handing out cash, means-testing on income is always going to be identical to some universal lump sum plus some set of marginal tax rates.
First, maybe you're worried about distorting a market. Medicare, for example, pays some factor times the prevailing rate for certain things. I don't want to get into whether or not that's a good way to do things, but it does mean that you couldn't handle everyone's treatment through Medicare without changing anything else about the law, and the more people you treat through Medicare the less you can be sure that you're paying a market price. A universal program will cause more market distortion than a means-tested one. An example might be the nearly universal availability of subsidized student loans allowing tuition to rise.
Second, programs alter people's incentives. Suppose you have a rent-assistance program that pays the first $300 of everyone's monthly rent. For low-income people who are on tight budgets, that's fine, provided landlords don't all just raise their rents by $300. The whole point is to get poor people to pay more than they otherwise would for better housing than they'd otherwise get. But with a universal program young professionals who have more money to spend would likewise get that voucher, and they would then tend to rent nicer apartments than they'd rent if they were just given cash in the amount of the voucher. That's inefficient.
Third, programs can be inefficient themselves. Not everything is like health care; there are lots of things the government just isn't very good at. The bigger the program the more loss there is.
All that said, I agree that there are advantages to not needing to pay attention to who's eligible for a program, and there are huge political advantages to not needing to defend a program as being for the poor.
speculawyer
Member
Well . . . that Christ guy was sure an asshole for curing people and raising them from the dead then! Those people made to Heaven and he drags them back to physical world such that they had to suffer more eventually had to die again.
BTW, it is funny that Al Franken is a now a Senator while Victoria Jackson is now crazy internet right-wing troll lady. I suspect she's banned from Fox News for being so bat shit crazy.
Really?
You think that what stands between Medicare and abusing its buying power is means testing?
Sorry, but the numbers are not there.
But maybe more importantly, Medicare is not a for profit corporation, it doesn't need to behave like a monopolistic corporation, we get to decide how it acts and we get to set the compensation level.
And come on, market distortions?
Have you read the brilliant Time piece on healthcare cost?
(if not stop everything and read it now).
The market hasn't exactly performed all that well for patients, maybe it can use a distortion or two.
Also we got to stop talking like a "market distortion" is an inherently bad thing.
Minimum wages is a market distortion, so are workplace safety and child labor laws, those are all good things for society, but they distort the market much more than the extra distortive effect medicare will have for not having mean tested.
What incentives are you talking about specifically here?
To what beneficial behavior me (or anyone else for that matter) is incentivized for having a mean tested system?
No sure I fully follow your voucher example.
But they can also be efficient.
In fact, medicare is more efficient than any for profit health insurance program out there.
Also, what makes you think that the government isn't good at doing these things?
Outside killing people, it's the stuff it has most experience with (and more happy costumers than those on the receiving end of our military programs).
That's actually demonstrably false, insurance programs of any kind are more efficient the bigger they are.
Edit: that tone came across a bit more combative than I intended, so you'll have to take me at my word that I'm genuinely asking.
Aaron Strife
Banned
Jesus that's nuts. So it's a good thing that people die? Should we just shoot 'em all now and let God sort them out?
el retorno
Member
Slip of the tongue but still funny in that it's the real goal.
At a guess, she probably isn't pro-choice.
Though, pro-choice wouldn't even be consistent with her statement. Being pro-abortion would be.
Helpfully for her intellectual consistency (such as it is), unbaptized babies don't go to heaven, so she can easily justify forcing people to have babies so that they can be baptized. After that it's okay if they die, though.
jamesinclair
Banned
We support giving the homeless lead poisoning now?
Chichikov, I'm not trying to make much of a claim about Medicare. Like I said, I didn't want to get into whether or not Medicare paying some factor times a prevailing rate for some things is a good idea, and I wasn't asserting that Medicare was actually big enough to be problematic in the way I was describing. I'm just saying that, if you want to do things that way, you want to make sure that your program is never accounting for nearly all of the market, or else you'll be overpaying. I'm not saying market distortions are always bad things, but they're bad when you're, for example, promising to pay a prevailing price and thus creating an incentive for sellers to set a higher price than would otherwise make sense in order to charge the government program more.
As I said, plausibly an example of this in action is subsidized student loans, the availability of which has probably contributed to the high cost of tuition (by subsidized, I mean to also include what are called unsubsidized student loans, which are still subsidized in that the government will pay them off as a last resort). To some extent, the government is just promising to help pay whatever colleges feel like charging, and enough students take out student loans that they bid up tuition at many schools. This would be less of an issue, and tuition would probably be at least a little lower, if there were not universal eligibility for these loans. Of course this is not the only factor in tuition costs.
Skipping down to my third point really quickly, if it wasn't clear I was specifically pointing to health care as something the government can take a big hand in and do really well. But there's a reason that the government just hands out food stamps and writes some light regulation instead of trying to run grocery stores itself. The US government just doesn't do a lot of things directly that it would make sense to talk about means-testing, but there are lots of possible programs that would involve this.
This is going to be a potential problem with any program where the benefit is more than some people would otherwise choose to consume without the program. For some programs this is actually a feature - preventive health care is underconsumed in a market, for example - but it is an actual problem for others. It ends up misallocating resources. Means-testing lets people who don't clearly need help affording a basic amount of some thing choose how much or what kind of thing to consume.
All of these possible failings of universal programs are less about the program's universality and more about the benefit being something other than cash. You introduce possible inefficiencies when you tax people to provide everyone with something that may not be as useful to them as cash. Obviously in some cases, such as health care, the government can spend money more efficiently than people can individually, but markets really are pretty good for lots of things.
As I said, plausibly an example of this in action is subsidized student loans, the availability of which has probably contributed to the high cost of tuition (by subsidized, I mean to also include what are called unsubsidized student loans, which are still subsidized in that the government will pay them off as a last resort). To some extent, the government is just promising to help pay whatever colleges feel like charging, and enough students take out student loans that they bid up tuition at many schools. This would be less of an issue, and tuition would probably be at least a little lower, if there were not universal eligibility for these loans. Of course this is not the only factor in tuition costs.
Skipping down to my third point really quickly, if it wasn't clear I was specifically pointing to health care as something the government can take a big hand in and do really well. But there's a reason that the government just hands out food stamps and writes some light regulation instead of trying to run grocery stores itself. The US government just doesn't do a lot of things directly that it would make sense to talk about means-testing, but there are lots of possible programs that would involve this.
Looking back, the example I was using doesn't quite work. People who were going to be paying more than $300/mo in rent anyway would not change their behavior if given a voucher instead of cash. But there is an impact on people who are thinking of buying instead of renting, right? If you give everyone a voucher for $300/mo of rent, that might work perfectly at low incomes where almost everyone is renting. At higher incomes, some people are thinking about buying instead. However, because you're giving them a voucher, there's an extra $300/mo opportunity cost to buying. Some people who would have bought if your program was means-tested and they just had more take-home pay rather than a rent voucher will choose to rent instead. That's a clear inefficiency.
This is going to be a potential problem with any program where the benefit is more than some people would otherwise choose to consume without the program. For some programs this is actually a feature - preventive health care is underconsumed in a market, for example - but it is an actual problem for others. It ends up misallocating resources. Means-testing lets people who don't clearly need help affording a basic amount of some thing choose how much or what kind of thing to consume.
All of these possible failings of universal programs are less about the program's universality and more about the benefit being something other than cash. You introduce possible inefficiencies when you tax people to provide everyone with something that may not be as useful to them as cash. Obviously in some cases, such as health care, the government can spend money more efficiently than people can individually, but markets really are pretty good for lots of things.
jamesinclair
Banned
Ive found that the ignore option has suddenly made this thread a much better read.
To the first bold:
You don't need to look far to find parallels. The government sets limits on all sorts of things, from the amount of liquid we can carry onto a plane (in the interest of the plane's passengers) to how fast we can drive on the roads. In the case of giant sodas, it's bad for the person but it's also terrible for the country as a whole and is contributing to a genuine healthcare crisis. We have self-imposed limitations on what society consumes all around us. Many places have bans on sodas in schools, for example, with little outrage other than from the companies that manufacture and sell the soda. Fructose is a poison and it is poisoning the populace, doing us as a country tremendous harm. I think that's exactly the kind of thing government should be doing.
That said, there are several other things that can be done to mitigate the damage. In the case of giant sodas, I might even prefer other means. I support a heavy tax on soda, along with more bold labeling (slap how many calories is in those giant cups, loud and clear). I don't like the phrase "sin taxes" for such. Again, we as a society have made enormous numbers of decisions around what we value. When I lived in Iowa, we had a sales tax on manufactured food (i.e., potato chips) but not raw ingredients (i.e., bags of flour and fresh produce), because the state put a value on the populace eating healthier. It wasn't some radical big brother scheme. It was practical, as Iowans tend to be.
Just look around at what we tax or place fees on in general and you will find the idea is not really that strange after all.
Yes, you can take things we do and extend them to absurd extremes as with your TV and video game example. Obviously we need to draw lines at what is reasonable and what is not. That is why we have elections; many of our restrictions are either self-imposed or accepted, and those things can change. (Look at where marijuana legalization is going.) For that reason I see little value making absurdest arguments. We ban or restrict/limit ourselves in scores of ways. The idea of a limit, or tax, on harmful substances is not so far fetched. Personally, I don't think it will hold up, as people love their sodas. A tax is much more palatable, so to speak.
The Librarian
Banned
Jamesinclair is a troll (I'm assuming). Why should I take the copper thing seriously? As for CyclopsRock, I did respond to him. And, honestly, I couldn't tell if he was joking or not when he mentioned a tax on anal sex. I'm not attacking them, simply the absurdity of what they're saying. If it comes off the other way then I apologize.
That was a bad way of asking why he's so invested in the topic.
Avon Barksdale
Member
MSNBC showing their liberal bias once again.
Rocket Scientist
Member
American liberal media is pathetic. Why even attempt to cater to the middle or right if they're going to dismiss you anyway.
ClassyPenguin
Banned
I love the New Yorker and NY Times articles that are making fun of Ryan's plan.
How was this clown ever taken seriously?
How was this clown ever taken seriously?
Dr. Pangloss
Member
No, you try to distract from the crux of their argument. It's like pro-life people asking a pro-choice candidate if they support killing babies. It's just a distraction and not getting to why people are pro-choice. Jamesinclair hasn't brought up the copper thing since October at least. You brought it up to demean him.
Who cares why CyclopsRock is invested in a topic? Why does that matter to his argument?
RustyNails
Member
Shh...don't tell Americans spending means medicare, medicaid and other government sponsored programs. Americans think cutting spending means firing lazy dmv workers.
Well, obviously. We pay into those services with our taxes, and as such, we deserve them! its completely different from those bums who dont pay taxes or get paid by the government
Frank the Great
Banned
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