Pass a Law! Liberalism to It's Ultimate Conclusion

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http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/polit ... usion.html

Now it's time to make a ridiculous straw man of right-wing ideology taken to it's obvious logical conclusion. Sadly though, it looks like it's you who fail to see the ultimate consequences of your ideology.

@marshall:

Tell me what my ideology is and what it's consequences are since you know so much about it.

It's not our fault that liberals are making conspiracy theorists look completely sane.

Hmm, nope - reverse that.

Just cause Beck decides to use wooden puppets as props when he is explaining something doesn't mean that he nor does it mean his audience is insane. It is shown that people can sometimes follow an explanation better if there are visual aids involved in the explanation.

Aw! That is just so cute, oh em gee!
Its like Fraggle Rock! Only starring Beck! I knew one day he would be Jim Henson's successor!

The great irony, of course, is that the United States government is involved in one of the largest wealth redistributions in human history--extracting taxes and distributing them to its suppliers and contractors--particularly those engaged in supplies and services for its misguided adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The simple truth is that social programs and a public health insurance option would be readily sustainable in the current US economy were it not for the gigantic corporate welfare fraud being perpetrated in the name of a war on terrorism. Corporate interests demonize the poor, and deflect attention away from their looting.

Now there is a flip side--after all, Haliburton and its ilk employ a lot of people, and provide a significant economic engine, and pouring money into the sinkhole that is military procurement ensures that public money is (largely) spent within the United States. From that lens, a (ahem) robust military budget is really little more than covert stimulus spending.

Before you get too high and mighty about liberalism, let's take a good look at how public money is funding the salaries of millions of working Americans. Conservatives may have dressed up their vast wealth redistribution scheme--but it is, at root, little different.

Yeah, its all just a big corporate conspiracy to keep the poor people poor! 'Cuz corporations make more money when all their customers have no money to spend.

Sounds like the crap I thought was true when I was in high school. The man is keepin' me down.

Okay, we created a mess when we went into Iraq and Afghanistan. We have a responsibility to clean up after ourselves rather than leave a power vacuum.



False, we could be spending no money for discretionary spending (which includes completely defunding the military) and we would still be running a large deficit just from entitlements. Fact of the matter is Canada's healthcare system is not the wonder it is painted to be, in fact it is going broke.
The patient wasn't dead, according to the doctor who showed the letter to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. But there are many Canadians who claim the long wait for the test and the frigid formality of the letter are indicative of a health system badly in need of emergency care.

Americans who flock to Canada for cheap flu shots often come away impressed at the free and first-class medical care available to Canadians, rich or poor. But tell that to hospital administrators constantly having to cut staff for lack of funds, or to the mother whose teenager was advised she would have to wait up to three years for surgery to repair a torn knee ligament.

"It's like somebody's telling you that you can buy this car, and you've paid for the car, but you can't have it right now," said Jane Pelton. Rather than leave daughter Emily in pain and a knee brace, the Ottawa family opted to pay $3,300 for arthroscopic surgery at a private clinic in Vancouver, with no help from the government.

"Every day we're paying for health care, yet when we go to access it, it's just not there," said Pelton.

The average Canadian family pays about 48 percent of its income in taxes each year, partly to fund the health care system. Rates vary from province to province, but Ontario, the most populous, spends roughly 40 percent of every tax dollar on health care, according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

The system is going broke, says the federation, which campaigns for tax reform and private enterprise in health care.

It calculates that at present rates, Ontario will be spending 85 percent of its budget on health care by 2035. "We can't afford a state monopoly on health care anymore," says Tasha Kheiriddin, Ontario director of the federation. "We have to examine private alternatives as well."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/03/ ... cmp=EM8705

That is from a left wing source that supports Government Run Healthcare.



The advancements used in military hardware does convert over to civilian use just like NASA research, so it actually does help our economy in technological advantages.

[/quote]

Difference is Public Sector Jobs do not help the economy, it just means higher taxes to pay for more public employees, which takes money away from the private sector. We need the private sector to be hiring, but with Obamacare, tax increases, uncertainty, and anti-business legislation by Democrats, it is actually insane to look to hire anyone else or even maintain the current employees.

Is it me or do all of Inurasha's posts always end getting green background?

He plans ahead!

But you aren't cleaning up after yourselves--you're just keeping the fiscal pump running. I would have far greater respect for this exercise if there was some prospect of a successful resolution.



In the first place, mandatory spending is roughly equal to projected revenues for FY2011 ($2177bn in mandatory spending, $2174 in proejcted revenue), so your description of a "large deficit just from entitlements" does not stand up to scrutiny.

But more to the point, you didn't read what I wrote, Inuyasha. I didn't say that they were sustainable within current US government revenue, I said they were sustainable within the current US economy. Canada has a fully-funded public pension scheme--the only one in the G8. The United States could easily achieve full funding of social security, if only the government had the political will to do so.



I have never claimed that our system is perfect, nor, indeed that there are not significant structural pressures in need of reform.

But the fact remains that in Canada, we spend a smaller percentage of our GDP on health (both public and private spending) (10.1% at PPP vs. 16% in the USA), and all levels of government in Canada spend less [i]per capita on direct health care costs than do all levels of government in the United States. And even though our governments are spending less per person than yours, we still manage to provide universal insurance for medically necessary care, and we achieve health outcomes that are as good or better than those in the United States.

Is our system perfect? Of course not. But it is cheaper that yours, with outcomes that are just as good as yours.



For every waiting list anecdote that you can pull up, I can pull up an anecdote of a patient left to die at a US emergency room door: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/h ... ath12.html

At the end of the day these are merely anecdotes. They tend to be newsworthy because they are outliers. They do not represent the experience of majority of participants in the system.



You need to cite these figures in context. The tax load should be broken down. The CTF routinely bulks up its figures using tax load to all three levels of government, as well as including mandatory charges such as EI and CPP contributions. However, it makes no corresponding offset for Canadians who pay no tax to municipalities because they do not own property, nor for the accumulated value of mandatory contributions.

The 40% figure in Ontario needs to be understood in two contexts--it fails to consider the impact of equalization--which has a significant impact on provincial spending capacity, and it fails to put the expenditure into context of the relatively small sphere of provincial responsibilities (when compared with, say, US states) and the federal funding that flows to provinces for health spending.



I would describe the CTF as many things but it is not left wing, and it does not support publicly funded health insurance. If you are citing CBS as a left wing source, you are being disingenuous because you are failing to distinguish between the medium and the source.



So are you saying that it is appropriate to use public money to distort the marketplace by publicly funding R&D and allowing companies to then exploit that publicly funded R&D for commercial advantage? I'm not saying that you're wrong, but let's be clear that the government is playing an active role in the economy when it does this--and that seems to run counter to your right wing ideology.



Read more closely. I am not talking about the public sector at all. I am talking about private sector jobs funded by the public purse. The US government is pushing huge amounts of money into the private sector, and directly funding those private sector jobs. The scale of the wealth transfer makes stimulus spending look like small change--and the government is doing it not on a one-time basis, but on an ongoing basis.

Time and again it has been demonstrated that the best way of getting the private sector to create jobs is for government to fill the void on the demand side. By spending on infrastructure, military hardware and supply and the like, government gets about 150% bang for the buck when it becomes a player in the marketplace and actively buys goods and services.

This compares with a meagre 40% when government spends fiscal room on tax cuts. Tax increases don't provide a disincentive to job creation--after all, it never hurts you to earn an extra dollar. The disincentive to job creation is uncertainty in the market.

liberalism is a religion

@visagrunt wrote:

Tax increases cause uncertainty in the market. That would be a bait and switch I believe.



The condition of US economy is currently demonstrating that to be pure BS.

That word does not mean what you think it does.