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PoliGAF 2013 |OT2| Worth 77% of OT1

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Gguy: Yeah, exactly. I say hope because right now, the easy play to advance in the GOP has been to pander to the loud, extreme side. If this subset gets bigger, that will no longer be true.
 
The big thing that pisses me off about Wisconsin is mainly just the recent politics. People are too split and die-hard, and there are a lot of just nutso Republicans around now. It's like they came out of the woodwork and decided to scream at the top of their lungs every chance they get. It felt like before Walker yeah we had republicans, but they voted their mind and then kind of did their own thing and so yeah whatever we disagree but that's cool. Now it's just unbearable in places. That's pretty much the big thing I dislike about Wisconsin now. Everyone used to be pretty friendly to most everyone. Now it all feels so hostile.

The funny thing is is that these people are suffering. They don't have a job or that their current job isn't doing so hot due to the lack of business. But because they need to believe that their ideology is working, they play mental mind games and assume things are okay. "Its not the policies that are making the business and my workplace suffer, but the business's lack of advertising" or "We'll we still are in a recession!" Its hilarious.

Though if it helps my town just got a bit more socialist today. Not only are they replacing the old recycling bins, but they are also having people replace their old (self brought) garbage cans with two new 96 gallon trash and recycling cans.

I think part of it is as people get older and build a family they become more fiscally conservative. And that steers them more towards the GOP. But for me, it seems the GOP is just a crazy in their financial policies as they are in their social policies.

This use to be the theory but the chart proved that voting habits stay more or less the same after your first two or three election cycles.

No one else has followed up on this, so I'll bite. What was all that stuff about asian immigrants superperforming and going from there into how all the other poor people need to bootstraps not mah hard earned money rawr? Looked a lot like a political conversion in progress, not that Poe's Law hasn't hoodwinked me many times before.

I'm surprised with how many people have responded to me posting that (up until now they all PM'd me). I feel sort of lazy right now after responding to so many people in this post so I'll just copy and paste what I replied to someone else:

Me said:
First off yes that thread was a troll thread, well sort of. I was curious about the topic of what tends to make people poor in America, I was going to make it a serious topic but I realized that people probably wouldn't care about it. I thought of doing the Linux effect. Basically if I were to make the thread and take it seriously I would only get two or three replies. However if I said something like "poor people are dumb" or "poor people deserve to die" I would get a shit ton of responses, which is what happened. This may sound embarrassing but I'm young enough to the point where I have never truly lived on my own (pay rent, utilities, etc.) so I'm not sure how hard it is to "make it" for the average person in real life. I admit though that much of it was because I was bored and felt like giving people a rise so I made it a troll topic. For that I apologize and its something I won't do again.

In terms of my ideology. I use to be a socialist when I first came to this board. I believed that workers should own their businesses, people should be paid equal, a majority of the economy should be nationalized, etc.

Anyway upon further researching I found that social mobility isn't as rare as I thought it was. A big reason why I supported far left politics is because I felt that people moving from one social class to another was very very rare. It wasn't until I did research that I found out that it was more common than I thought. There is also of course the Asian immigrants. I assumed that most of the original immigrants from 70s and 80s came here with money, connections, and or experience like most Asian immigrants today. This wasn't true for many and this resulted in a vast majority of these people working their way out of poverty. Its rare and not realistic for most but it shows that it IS possible. I know people commented that I have a weird "fetish" for this but I think I always go back to it because this was a turning point in my viewpoints.
 
So many of people who identify as republicans say sound things, yet they elect the most unreasonable, far right candidates.


Show you're reasonable people by electing reasonable candidates. Until then, your "reasonable" policy stances are bullshit, since the people you're electing don't hold those views.

I'd say of all the main GOP presidential candidates for President, Romney and McCain were the most moderate out of Cain, Perry, Bachmann, Paul, and Santorum.

It doesn't make the GOP reasonable, but I think they did the best with the hand that they were dealt lol.

Although Jon Huntsman would have been a candidate I could have considered voting for.
 

gcubed

Member
Rush and Fox News have failed the younger generation. :(

Also, I was scouting the right-wing sites reporting about Biden making that Strom Thurmond joke, and wouldn't you know it? Seems everyone's mad that Biden's speaking ill of the dead. LOL.

i mean, do they think they are republicans because their parents are? Unless they are single issue pro life voters?
 

B-Dubs

No Scrubs
Rush and Fox News have failed the younger generation. :(

Also, I was scouting the right-wing sites reporting about Biden making that Strom Thurmond joke, and wouldn't you know it? Seems everyone's mad that Biden's speaking ill of the dead. LOL.

Wouldn't be Biden if they didn't.

I swear, it's a real-life Onion article every day.

I don't even know how they manage to keep up any more.
 

Oblivion

Fetishing muscular manly men in skintight hosery
i mean, do they think they are republicans because their parents are? Unless they are single issue pro life voters?

There's plenty of polling out there that shows many voters who don't generally like the Democrat Party, do in fact like Democrat policies. Obamacare is a great example of this.
 

B-Dubs

No Scrubs
There's plenty of polling out there that shows many voters who don't generally like the Democrat Party, do in fact like Democrat policies. Obamacare is a great example of this.

It's basically a messaging thing then. Dems get a bad rap, yet people still like their policies. That says a lot, Dems have the problem the GOP thinks they themselves have.
 
Also too, regarding that same report: Bill O'Reilly asks "Why should the Republican Party care about a bunch of kids who don’t know anything?"

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/bill-oreilly-pans-college-gop-report-92267.html#ixzz2VStrFPyQ

This is a great example of what is the problem with the GOP. Their core of the party is unwilling to self-reflect. They externalize their faults.

It's not that Mitt Romney had bad ideas, it's that he wasn't charismatic!

As long as they continue this way

"we can't win the youth unless we're cool"
"we need a minority to run"
"if we pass immigration reform, hispanics will come back"
"they're religious like us, we just need to rephrase things!"

and not realize it's their actual positions that are the problem, they'll continue to flounder going forward.

O'Reilly dismisses the youth vote as basically idiots who just want to vote for someone cool. Reality is that young people are naturally more liberal and as long as they put up a conservative platform, it will be overwhelmingly rejected.
 

FLEABttn

Banned
"we can't win the youth unless we're cool"

O'Reilly dismisses the youth vote as basically idiots who just want to vote for someone cool.

They really put too much faith in "kids only vote for cool". John Kerry could hardly be considered cool but still won the 18-29 demographic two election cycles ago.
 
About 19 million young adults 18 to 34 lack health insurance. Our polling shows that less than 5 percent of young people choose not to have it. The number one reason they don’t have it is the cost. Most young people don’t qualify for Medicaid right now even if they have very low incomes because most states just don’t give childless adults Medicaid. That’s one of the biggest changes under Obamacare. If every state expanded Medicaid, about 8 million would qualify for Medicaid. Another 9 million would qualify for subsidies because they make less than 400 percent of poverty.

Klein: So then 17 of the 19 million uninsured young people are, in theory, eligible for either subsidies or Medicaid under Obamacare?

That’s right. It’s a pretty phenomenal percentage. So if we do our jobs right, young people will be one of the biggest winners in the health-care law.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...g-adults-want-obamacare-lets-ask-aaron-smith/

So 90% of uninsured young adults could conceivably get affordable health insurance if every state expanded.

But Avik Roy told me all those rich young people would have to pay more for insurance!

They really put too much faith in "kids only vote for cool". John Kerry could hardly be considered cool but still won the 18-29 demographic two election cycles ago.

They're simply in denial. It's like they're drug addicts and are on the denial stage. Eventually, they'll realize they have a problem. IT'S NOT YOU IT'S ME
 
So 90% of uninsured young adults could conceivably get affordable health insurance if every state expanded.

But Avik Roy told me all those rich young people would have to pay more for insurance!

Can you post the link? TF quotes huge articles but doesn't post the link. Don't you start doing it too!
 

Oblivion

Fetishing muscular manly men in skintight hosery
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...g-adults-want-obamacare-lets-ask-aaron-smith/

So 90% of uninsured young adults could conceivably get affordable health insurance if every state expanded.

But Avik Roy told me all those rich young people would have to pay more for insurance!

Curious, the subsidies are a great thing, but what's to stop insurers from jacking up premiums under the rationale that people will still be able to afford it cause of the subsidies?
 
Curious, the subsidies are a great thing, but what's to stop insurers from jacking up premiums under the rationale that people will still be able to afford it cause of the subsidies?

Some states have their own regulators that prevent such rate hikes, and that ratio that forces insurance companies to spend 80 - 85% of their profit on customers.
 
Curious, the subsidies are a great thing, but what's to stop insurers from jacking up premiums under the rationale that people will still be able to afford it cause of the subsidies?

Competition. 13 companies are selling. If 12 jack up rates, all one has to do is lower it and get all the clients.

I don't know much about the law so someone else would have to speak on it, but there might be caps on how much it could be raised in a year. Remember all those people also getting refunds this year because of a part of the law?

edit: Seems el retorno and Dax beat me to that part.
 

Gotchaye

Member
If you agree with all these things then why bother identifying as Republican at all?

If my experience of young Texans is representative, it's abortion. College Republicans are either libertarian Rand Paul types or really religious. Even the really religious ones have a hard time sustaining anti-gay attitudes given how many gay people they encounter on a regular basis.
 
Competition. 13 companies are selling. If 12 jack up rates, all one has to do is lower it and get all the clients.

I don't know much about the law so someone else would have to speak on it, but there might be caps on how much it could be raised in a year. Remember all those people also getting refunds this year because of a part of the law?

Hasn't worked before.
 
Hasn't worked before.

Well, I can only speak on Cali, but there wasn't competition here. Only 3 firms could compete. Yeah, there's like a small amount in the individual market that others compete in, but it's pretty insignificant when most capture roughly 1% of the market.

With 3 firms, you're at a near duopoly (when you profit maximize in a system with homogeneous products, which we have in health insurance in Cali, the number of firms makes a big difference, and 3 firms puts us no where near the competitive price and is fairly well between the monopoly price and that one).

But with 13 firms, theoretically it should change. That's one of the arguments behind it made by the Obama admin. Firms that were never in the individual market in Cali prior are now in the exchanges. There will be an issue of name recognition, but if these smaller known companies can combine to take an increasing hold on the individual market so that the big 3 are much lower than the 85% of the market they now control, competition would make a difference.

I'm not sure how it will play out because Anthem and blue shield are household names. But we'll see. Now, if Obamacare capped the marketshare a company could have...
 

GhaleonEB

Member
Hasn't worked before.

I an article I read recently, I can't remember where - might have been Wonkblog - noted it's already working on the exchanges. In one of the exchanges (I want to say Oregon), the premiums submitted by the insurance companies were clumped in a tight range - with one company undercutting them. The other insurance companies looked at that, and asked to re-submit their premiums at lower rates to be more competetive, otherwise everyone picking insurance on the exchange would have gone with the other company. The article was about ways the exchanges were already working, before even opening up.

I'll try to find the article tonight if no one digs up a link by then.
 

User 406

Banned
First off yes that thread was a troll thread, well sort of.

Well, you took me in!

In terms of my ideology. I use to be a socialist when I first came to this board. I believed that workers should own their businesses, people should be paid equal, a majority of the economy should be nationalized, etc.

Anyway upon further researching I found that social mobility isn't as rare as I thought it was. A big reason why I supported far left politics is because I felt that people moving from one social class to another was very very rare. It wasn't until I did research that I found out that it was more common than I thought. There is also of course the Asian immigrants. I assumed that most of the original immigrants from 70s and 80s came here with money, connections, and or experience like most Asian immigrants today. This wasn't true for many and this resulted in a vast majority of these people working their way out of poverty. Its rare and not realistic for most but it shows that it IS possible.

It's always possible. The problem is it isn't probable. The graph you linked makes it pretty clear where the problem lies. The middle three quintiles have a fairly flat distribution of outcomes, but if you start poor, you're not likely to get much higher, and if you start rich, you're gonna stay rich. Poverty is very hard to get out of, and pointing at the success stories and asking why the rest don't do the same is ignoring the huge built-in obstacles and problems poverty imposes on people, not to mention the fact that racism is a huge institutional factor in limiting potential mobility. Add to that simple random chance that can ruin even the best laid plans and determination, and the idea that the main thing lacking to improve your station is "hard work" becomes a terrible oversimplification, and is why this sort of thing is roundly mocked with the bootstraps meme.

More to the point, even if it is possible to grind your way out of poverty through determined toil, why should we as a society tolerate it? Why would we even want people to live such hard lives? We have more than enough resources to ensure that everyone can have a place to live, food to eat, health care, and access to commerce. That we can even entertain the notion that poverty is somehow necessary to motivate people into working harder is vile and shameful. That last bit isn't necessarily directed at you, it was an appalling free market fundamentalist idea from another thread. But if you're implying that you're no longer as supportive of social support policies because you've read about a group of impoverished people who managed to make it, you're headed down that road.
 

GaimeGuy

Volunteer Deputy Campaign Director, Obama for America '16
I'd say of all the main GOP presidential candidates for President, Romney and McCain were the most moderate out of Cain, Perry, Bachmann, Paul, and Santorum.

It doesn't make the GOP reasonable, but I think they did the best with the hand that they were dealt lol.

Although Jon Huntsman would have been a candidate I could have considered voting for.

Nope.

Paul Ryan was the VP candidate.

And 4 years before that, Sarah Palin was the candidate.

The faces of the GOP are people like Michelle Bachmann. And other people who are Nucking Futs.

Call me when they're not running for the hills away from these types.
 
I an article I read recently, I can't remember where - might have been Wonkblog - noted it's already working on the exchanges. In one of the exchanges (I want to say Oregon), the premiums submitted by the insurance companies were clumped in a tight range - with one company undercutting them. The other insurance companies looked at that, and asked to re-submit their premiums at lower rates to be more competetive, otherwise everyone picking insurance on the exchange would have gone with the other company. The article was about ways the exchanges were already working, before even opening up.

I'll try to find the article tonight if no one digs up a link by then.

I know the article to which you're referring. I was talking about the idea of a "free-market" competition rather than government-sanctioned ones.
 
T

thepotatoman

Unconfirmed Member
Well, I can only speak on Cali, but there wasn't competition here. Only 3 firms could compete. Yeah, there's like a small amount in the individual market that others compete in, but it's pretty insignificant when most capture roughly 1% of the market.

With 3 firms, you're at a near duopoly (when you profit maximize in a system with homogeneous products, which we have in health insurance in Cali, the number of firms makes a big difference, and 3 firms puts us no where near the competitive price and is fairly well between the monopoly price and that one).

But with 13 firms, theoretically it should change. That's one of the arguments behind it made by the Obama admin. Firms that were never in the individual market in Cali prior are now in the exchanges. There will be an issue of name recognition, but if these smaller known companies can combine to take an increasing hold on the individual market so that the big 3 are much lower than the 85% of the market they now control, competition would make a difference.

I'm not sure how it will play out because Anthem and blue shield are household names. But we'll see. Now, if Obamacare capped the marketshare a company could have...

The problem is that you still need a lot more trust in an insurance provider than you do most products. It's not like it's cheap enough you can take a risk like with trying out a generic brand soda or a no name HDMI cable manufacturer, and it's not like a car purchase where you can at least try it out and see what you are actually getting before you buy it.

You're basically paying a ton of money now on hopes that at some point in the future you will get a good service. It's really hard to take that risk on a no name company that nobody else uses. Even if it is literally the only insurance you can afford, its easy to say you don't want to waste money on it and just hope the government covers for you when you need it at some point, because in the end the brand is about the only thing that you can reasonably go off of.

It's possible the brands will compete on price between each other, but I still don't see the smaller companies standing a chance.
 
The problem is that you still need a lot more trust in an insurance provider than you do most products. It's not like it's cheap enough you can take a risk like with trying out a generic brand soda or a no name HDMI cable manufacturer, and it's not like a car purchase where you can at least try it out and see what you are actually getting before you buy it.

You're basically paying a ton of money now on hopes that at some point in the future you will get a good service. It's really hard to take that risk on a no name company that nobody else uses. Even if it is literally the only insurance you can afford, its easy to say you don't want to waste money on it and just hope the government covers for you when you need it at some point, because in the end the brand is about the only thing that you can reasonably go off of.

It's possible the brands will compete on price between each other, but I still don't see the smaller companies standing a chance.

All valid points.

But to be fair, these aren't complete no-name insurances. They're just no-namers in the individual market. They would insure commercial real estate or employer health insurance, etc before without bothering with the individual market since it was already so dominated.

And that fact that Cali has to approve them in the exchanges should give confidence in these companies.
 
It's always possible. The problem is it isn't probable. The graph you linked makes it pretty clear where the problem lies. The middle three quintiles have a fairly flat distribution of outcomes, but if you start poor, you're not likely to get much higher, and if you start rich, you're gonna stay rich.

I think the graph could be very misleading. I mean Not far from one tenth of people who hade parents that made more than $70,000 or so (I forget where the top quintile lies) fall into near or at poverty at the age of 40? I somehow doubt this. I'm sure there is some noise fucking this up such as they got laid off, they were self-employed and didn't report their earnings to the government, or something. Well off people won't let their kids become poor.

Also Gregory Clark did a study with surnames and showed that social mobility is FAR less prevalent than we like to believe it is. I always find that a lot of these social science studies to be bullshit (to be fair though even hard sciences, such as physics, have their fair share of bullshit as well). I was a psychology major and I saw it all the time with many of the papers they showed us. The most substantial myth is that your intelligence is more correlated with your genes than your environment. They "confirmed" this with twin studies. What they didn't tell you is that virtually all of these studies were done with agencies that place kids in high socio-economic environments. There is a recent study going on that compares adopted children from put in high socio-economic status households and children put in low socio-economic status households. The former have so far developed just as predicted (starting with 50% of intelligence due to genetics and are slowly progressing as that becoming more and more of a majority). The latter? 100% correlates with the adopted parent.

More to the point, even if it is possible to grind your way out of poverty through determined toil, why should we as a society tolerate it? Why would we even want people to live such hard lives? We have more than enough resources to ensure that everyone can have a place to live, food to eat, health care, and access to commerce. That we can even entertain the notion that poverty is somehow necessary to motivate people into working harder is vile and shameful. That last bit isn't necessarily directed at you, it was an appalling free market fundamentalist idea from another thread. But if you're implying that you're no longer as supportive of social support policies because you've read about a group of impoverished people who managed to make it, you're headed down that road.

True.
 
Costco is one of the few bargain retailers to see success in recent months, and according to one executive, it could be even more profitable. If only the company weren't so committed to paying workers a decent wage.

“Could Costco make more money if the average wage was $2 or $3 lower?” Richard Galanti, Costco’s chief financial officer, mused in an interview with Businessweek. “The answer is yes. But we’re not going to do that.”

The big box store most famous for its stockpiles of toilet paper and $1.50 hot dogs also has a reputation for paying its workers a higher wage than most of its competitors. The average Costco worker made about $45,000 per year, Fortune reports. By comparison, Walmart-owned Sam’s Club, a Costco competitor, pays its workers $17,486 per year, according to salary information site Glassdoor.com.

What’s more, Costco has continued to pay its workers decently even in the face of pressure to stop. Ever since the company went public in 1985, Wall Street investors have urged Costco executives to lower wages and cut health benefits, which are also relatively generous, according to Businessweek. Instead, the company’s former CEO and co-founder gave workers a raise every three years.

Costco’s insistence on treating its workers well hasn’t come at the expense of the company’s bottom line. The retailer’s profit jumped 19 percent to $459 million last quarter, while Walmart’s sales suffered during the same period.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/06/richard-galanti-wages_n_3396101.html

http://www.businessweek.com/article...the-cheapest-happiest-company-in-the-world#p1

<3 Costco
 

Hitokage

Setec Astronomer
Costco’s insistence on treating its workers well hasn’t come at the expense of the company’s bottom line. The retailer’s profit jumped 19 percent to $459 million last quarter, while Walmart’s sales suffered during the same period.
QudgJFP.jpg
 

Oblivion

Fetishing muscular manly men in skintight hosery
But think how much MORE Costco could pay its employees if we got rid of minimum wage laws.
 
Considering there's doubt the pathway to citizenship can even pass the House, I'm not sure I'd say Obamacare is the stumbling block. It's attached to the stumbling block: the pathway, but its existence or non-existence doesn't change anything for people who view this as amnesty.
 

Cloudy

Banned
Tech companies coming out and denying the WaPo PRISM story. Either the feds are going behind the internet companies to tap their data (How?) or someone is going to be making a big retraction soon. Either way, there will be a huge shitstorm..

I am so sick of this scandalmongering and faux outrage over EVERYTHING these past few months. NSA getting metadata under FISA is totally different from NSA wireless wiretapping. Conflating both issues is patently dishonest.

Where were all these media members when these laws were being passed in 2001?
 
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