Slowing economy complicates campaign messaging for Trump

[danielpalos]

Providing unemployment benefits may be desirable for an entire hosts of reasons, but increasing efficiency is certainly not one of them. Paying people to not work makes unemployment relatively more appealing: it can help some workers have a higher threat points for negociations, but it can also make people more inclined to leave their jobs or to move in between jobs more frequently to capture the gains without the efforts. Get your head out of your a**.

That sentence makes absolutely no sense.

I am not sure why you believe that under any subscription to Capitalism. Full employment of capital resources must equivalent to "filling the ounce" for practical benefits on Cost purposes. We don't need minimum wage jobs in our First World economy. We should be goading Capitalists to automate for the bottom line and not be such socialists. Higher paid labor pay more in taxes and create more in demand in Any long run equilibrium. And, we actually need the beneficial effect of an institutional upward pressure on wages instead of the reverse we have now under our current regime.

 

[TheEconomist]

We should be goading Capitalists to automate for the bottom line and not be such socialists.

You are the one talking about using state coercion to enforce your personal vision from the top down... And who are you calling "capitalist"? People working as managers? Or perhaps the owners? You realize that some of those owners are ordinary Joes and Janes saving for retirement, don't you?

Higher paid labor pay more in taxes and create more in demand in any long run equilibrium.

In your imagination, perhaps.

 

[TheEconomist]

That is what I am referring to under our form of Capitalism. We can have a capital good conversation under Capitalism. Market participation under our form of Capitalism is usually a requirement for capital to be used under truer forms of Capitalism. We should have no Homeless problem with equal protection of the law for unemployment compensation for simply being unemployed on an at-will basis in our at-will employment States, at the equivalent to fourteen dollars an hour, with or without a fifteen dollar an hour statutory minimum wage.

I do not have any doubt that you are heavily favorable to digging into the pockets of people who work for the greater benefit of people who would opt out of work as soon as they were offered pay without requiring them to put in any effort. You're not calling for a safety net, but for a lazy net.

Like all true socialists at heart, you are unbelievably generous when it comes to other people's money. Incidentally, other people's money is in fact other people's work, efforts and ingenuity... How about this, Dany, you can do something to reduce homelessnes yourself: offer a shower and a bed to a homeless person near you. I'm sure you have a couch to spare, but I know you won't do it. You won't lift a single finger to do something about social problems, unless it involves forcing other people to take care of something you personally decided was a problem using the solution you personally prefer to use.

 

[TheEconomist]

This is a subset of that theory, it is an efficient market hypothesis in modern times (...).

The EMH isn't some loosely, undefined idea. The idea is that arbitrage profits cannot be made because all relevant information has already been maximally exploited. The arbitrage profit also has a very clear, unambiguous meaning: it's a free opportunity to have some change of turning a buck.

I don't know what the hell you're rambling about with your "Age of Iron" comment either. The EMH was proposed by Eugene Fama in the 1960s in reaction to a negative finding he made: no matter the method he tried, he always failed to reliably forecast returns in securities market like the stock market. The idea is very recent and it concerns activity in modern financial markets.


All that you have managed to demonstrate thus far is that you're confused and economically illiterate.

 

[danielpalos]

You are the one talking about using state coercion to enforce your personal vision from the top down... And who are you calling "capitalist"? People working as managers? Or perhaps the owners? You realize that some of those owners are ordinary Joes and Janes saving for retirement, don't you?

In your imagination, perhaps.

Equal protection of the law is a social concept regarding Equality even under our form of Capitalism; we have a Constitution for a reason. Whoever has enough capital to influence those decisions.

Not this time. Higher paid labor must create more in Demand and pay more in Taxes in every long run equilibrium in our Republic. Fourteen dollars an hour for simply being unemployed with or without a fifteen dollar an hour statutory minimum wage, is a form of full employment of capital resources in our economy, and that increase in capital based market efficiency and multiplier effect upon our economy.

The economics are not in question, only right wing alleged sincerity and morality.

https://wdr.doleta.gov/research/FullText_Documents/ETAOP2010-10.pdf

 

[danielpalos]

I do not have any doubt that you are heavily favorable to digging into the pockets of people who work for the greater benefit of people who would opt out of work as soon as they were offered pay without requiring them to put in any effort. You're not calling for a safety net, but for a lazy net.

Like all true socialists at heart, you are unbelievably generous when it comes to other people's money. Incidentally, other people's money is in fact other people's work, efforts and ingenuity... How about this, Dany, you can do something to reduce homelessnes yourself: offer a shower and a bed to a homeless person near you. I'm sure you have a couch to spare, but I know you won't do it. You won't lift a single finger to do something about social problems, unless it involves forcing other people to take care of something you personally decided was a problem using the solution you personally prefer to use.

Morality is a form of externality to economics; you can't justify it since we have a First Amendment. I am finding it more difficult to believe you are an economist. What do the Poor tend to do with most of their income? Only Capital must circulate under Capitalism. And, employment is at-will not for any moral Cause in any at-will employment State. A multiplier of Two or more means this type of market friendly public policy can pay for itself through economic activity. Only lousy capitalists lose money on public policy when they don't need to.

 

[danielpalos]

The EMH isn't some loosely, undefined idea. The idea is that arbitrage profits cannot be made because all relevant information has already been maximally exploited. The arbitrage profit also has a very clear, unambiguous meaning: it's a free opportunity to have some change of turning a buck.

I don't know what the hell you're rambling about with your "Age of Iron" comment either. The EMH was proposed by Eugene Fama in the 1960s in reaction to a negative finding he made: no matter the method he tried, he always failed to reliably forecast returns in securities market like the stock market. The idea is very recent and it concerns activity in modern financial markets.


All that you have managed to demonstrate thus far is that you're confused and economically illiterate.

It is the concept not actual specific research in that "case study".

 

[Visbek]

I will grant right away that not all of them will be exceptionally civil all the time, but even as someone who often finds myself in disagreement with many of those people, I'd say most of the time it's really about arguing over what they perceive to be mistakes, errors and misunderstanding.

:shock:

The right is full of people who publicly proclaim that progressives are evildoers bent on destroying the nation. Limbaugh, Coulter, Malkin, Ingraham, Hannity, O'Reilly, Beck, Carlson... These are not fringe figures.

This is also the Age of Trump, where anyone on the right who deviates even the slightest bit from the Dear Leader's policies and Lie of the Day are flayed within an inch of their lives.

There are definitely civil pundits on both sides. However, that certainly is not the dominant stream on the right. 5 minutes of Fox News prime time should make that obvious.

If you want an example of this, consider the two press conferences Donald Trump held years ago following the Charlottesville incident....

Dude? Trump is a racist, who barely bothers to cover it up. The people who attended the Charlottesville rally were not mainstream conservatives who were nostalgic for statues of Robert E. Lee, they were hard right wing-nuts who chanted "Jews Will Not Replace Us."

All but the most hard-core white supremacists proclaim that they are "not racist," because they know that admitting the truth immediately puts them beyond the pale and relegates them to the fringes. As a result, no one can possibly take Trump's claims that he is "not racist" at face value. What we have seen throughout his career is his discrimination against blacks in Trump properties in the 1970s; his vilification of Mexican immigrants; his stated desire and legal attempts to ban Muslims from entering the US; his claims that recent Haitian immigrants “all have AIDS” and that Nigerians would "never go back to their huts" once they set foot in the US; his constant harping on crime in minority neighborhoods; hiring (and not firing) Stephen Miller as a policy advisor, and more.

We also see how, unlike any previous president, white supremacists constantly cheer for Trump, even after he reads "racism is evil" off a teleprompter, because they know he doesn't really mean it.

If you ask an average conservative or an average moderate if they could befriend liberals and hang out with them, they tend to reply in the positive. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to reply in the negative...

Uhhhh no. Among partisans, neither side tolerates the other well. There's quite a bit of research on that, by the way. One typical indicator is tolerance for intraparty marriages, which has dropped on both sides over the years. As researcher Lynn Vavreck points out, "In 1958, 33 percent of Democrats wanted their daughters to marry a Democrat, and 25 percent of Republicans wanted their daughters to marry a Republican. But by 2016, 60 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Republicans felt that way."

So no, there is no significant surfeit of tolerance exclusively on the right. Not even close.

It's not some kind of macho nonsense that people like about Trump. What some of them like is that they finally have a guy who throws punches back.

Uhh... yeah, that's pretty much the epitome of macho nonsense.

It's granted that he is not making the atmosphere better in Washington D.C., but he's not responsible for the foul air. He is merely the sane, strategically sound response to aggressive leftists in the media, the academia, and elsewhere who spend their time demonizing everyone on the right.

Or, he is yet another example of backlash, in this case against a black man holding the Presidency, and the gradual decline of white privilege.

There is nothing sane, strategic or sound for anyone other than CEOs and desperate white evangelicals, as his policies don't help anyone else.

 

[ataraxia]

When liberal politicians and pundits disagree with people on the right, they do not limit themselves to claim that those people are wrong. Most of the time, they will try to make the point that they are malign, evil.

That may be true in some situations. I can think of, for example, the Insurance lobby getting GOP Congressmen to try to cut pre-existing conditions protections. Or politicians promising that if people just get rid of the few protections people have for thise, they have a much better, beautiful plan that will cover everyone for much cheaper, just to get elected- when all along their only intention was to gut the existing protections for Health Insurance lobby interests. Or miners and loggers lobbying to destroy protected lands, endanger wildlife and destroy protected land for short term profits and greed. Or spending billions and creating all sorts of infrastructure, organization, and marketing for the tea party, and then trying to call it some kind of grassroots movement just to reduce their own personal taxes. Or politicians making up lies for six years straight about how we were not going to believe what their ”top people” were finding on Obama’s secret Kenyan birth certificate. Those are all deliberate and intentional evil and lies.

More often, I have found that The problem is just abject ignorance. Many ofbthese folks actually sincerely believe that the earth is only 6000 years old and that is what we’re supposed to teach in our public schools, and anyone trying to say otherwise is shoving godlessness and liberal indoctrination down their children’s throats. Or that every single scientific organization on the entire planet is wrong on climate change science, but some pundits on cable news know better. Or that trickle down economics (or whatever you want to call it) works.

 

[TheEconomist]

I can think of, for example, the Insurance lobby getting GOP Congressmen to try to cut pre-existing conditions protections. Or politicians promising that if people just get rid of the few protections people have for thise, they have a much better, beautiful plan that will cover everyone for much cheaper, just to get elected -- when all along their only intention was to gut the existing protections for Health Insurance lobby interests.

What you have here is a disagreement over what aspect of the problem should have precedence. In all fairness, coverage of pre-existing conditions is costly and there absolutely are problems with it. In particular, the whole point of insurance is to subsidize unhealthy people at the expense of healthy people. Obviously, the whole point is that you generally don't know if you will pay for insurance you will never use or if you will end up being a costly subscriber. In a competitive market, there is a way to get people with pre-existing conditions or high health risks covered: firms would simply impose a large premium to compensate for expected costs and the risks they undertake.

Now, you can complain that it's not fair, but then you have two solutions: (1) rely on private citizens to pick up the tab voluntarily through community organizations and the likes or (2) you use the full power of the State to coerce insurers into doing what you judge to be necessary. You give me an example of something you think to be evil, somehow not being very concerned about the fact that you're the one backing up coercion. Right here, you have a perfectly legitimate reason to not like any of those programs. That doesn't make libertarians evil by any stretch of the imagination: they just disagree with you about what moral principle should take precedence. If you move to more conservative people, you might not get only a libertarian impulse, but you will get people who generally dislike the whole idea of giving power to the government. Part of the issues surrounding the ACA was that it requires community ratings to make coverage of very unhealthy people reasonably priced, a mandatory subscription to make sure healthy people aren't pushed out of the risk pool and a subsidy to low income people to make sure you don't force people to pay for insurance with the money they use to buy the only sandwhich they will eat today...

There might be a private interest among insurance firms to lobby against all of the above because it would be more profitable for them, but that doesn't make all people who agree with the proposal evil. Moreover, it doesn't make politicians liars: clearly, some people would truly get a better deal without the government meddling in the insurance market on account that they aren't very risky clients. Of course, that would also mean some people who are big risks or who already suffer from health problems would have worst deals... I don't see a peculiar reason why someone would be evil to side with the former as opposed to the later group of people. More to the point, what eactly makes (2) so much better than (1)? It's not like you would go from something is being done for those people to absolutely nothing is being done for those people. Some people would certainly take action to tackle that problem even if the government isn't doing it.


Finally, you should not that someone could actually believe that you might be the evil one here, that it's all about digging into the pockets of other people and choosing on behalf of everyone how those funds should be used. It would probably be unfair, but I don't see how that is more unfair than what you just did.

 

[imagep]

I truly think it is counterproductive to keep insulting folks who support Trump. It probably makes some more entrenched in their thinking. It also allows for the disgrace that happened on CNN with Don Lemon. Did not see it but it seems he was laughing at insulting jokes.

Actions such as these probably makes many who don't consider themselves coastal elites oppose those arrogant enough to demean them.

Trumpers can't become anymore entrenched.

 

[TheEconomist]

Or spending billions and creating all sorts of infrastructure, organization, and marketing for the tea party, and then trying to call it some kind of grassroots movement just to reduce their own personal taxes.

You do not seem to realize something. If you are a wealthy businessman and you wanted to line your pockets, why would you assume that what you really want is less government? The best way to line your pocket without anyone seeing what is going on is to rig the board in your own favor. You push for pointless regulations that your legal team can handle without problem and that you can use to go after the little guy. Let's face it, with thousands of pages of regulations, it's almost a certainty that the little Joe doesn't comply with everything. You push for complicated tax codes under the guise of "justice," but you try to embed ludicrous loop holes everywhere so that your accountants can find a way around the payments while the little guy cannot figure his way out of that rabbit hole...

It's not by taking powers out of the hands of bureaucrats and politicians that you will make a fortune. It's by making sure the costs of doing business and of growing a business are very large for everybody else. It's true that in the next few quarters, getting a tax cut might make you happy. But so can a heavy state apparatus, provided it hurts the competition more than it hurts you. If you think politicians on the left aren't paying some attention to big businesses, you are walking aroun with blinders.

Or politicians making up lies for six years straight about how we were not going to believe what their ”top people” were finding on Obama’s secret Kenyan birth certificate.

Yes, some people are complete idiots. Conspiracy theories run rampant among radicals on both ends of the political spectrum.

 

[TheEconomist]

More often, I have found that the problem is just abject ignorance. Many of these folks actually sincerely believe that the earth is only 6000 years old and that is what we’re supposed to teach in our public schools, and anyone trying to say otherwise is shoving godlessness and liberal indoctrination down their children’s throats. Or that every single scientific organization on the entire planet is wrong on climate change science, but some pundits on cable news know better. Or that trickle down economics (or whatever you want to call it) works.

First of all, only Christian fundamentalists believe that the Earth is only several thousands of years old. To be entirely fair, what they do not like is that they do not get themselves to choose what their children should learn. From where I stand, their demands to cover what essentially are fringe religious doctrines in science classes is more or less a symmetrical response to what we demand of them: even though evolutionary biology is a perfectly legitimate scientific field, it does conflict with some of their belief and we essentially tell them to shut up on account that it's science. Well, strictly speaking, there is more than enough to study in biology to not even look at evolutionary biology and I'd be perfectly fine with a compromise where their kids get to substitute this part of a course with an assignment on something else. It's arguably inconsequential and it would likely get to stop meddling with scientific curriclum in schools.

Second of all, the accusation of "liberal indoctrination" is sometimes justified, albeit in other contexts. If you want a liberal equivalent to believing that global warming is a hoax, think about social constructivism. This idea that biological factors never play a role in human psychology enters in a very profound conflict with mass of data. Suppose for example that you use survey data to compare the distributions of men and women along dimensions of personality. What you will find is that those distributions overlap a lot (i.e., you can find men that are close to the female sterotypes and women who are close to the male sterotypes), but they are not identical. It doesn't matter if you change the survey questions, if you change the underlying model of personality, if you change the subset of countries or if you try to control for various factors that might influence upbringing. It's always the same patterns you will find and we're talking about absolutely massive survey research involving tens of thousands of people in dozen of countries that have replicated the results several times now. The most shocking finding of this strand of research is something no one ever predicted. Social constructivism says that those differences should all be explained by biased gender norms and values. They should die slowly as a culture becomes more egalitarian. But, guess what was found: no matter the dimension of personality you pick an no matter how you measure gender equality, the correlation is going to be positive, statistically significant and of the order of 30, 40 or sometimes even 50%. Men and women look alike the most in their personality in places like Jordan, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia and they are the most different in places like Denmark and Sweden...

At this point, someone who thinks that men and women are psychologically identical is believing in a flat Earth kind of theory: it just doesn't fit the data, period. That part of the debate is settled. Obviously, these weird unexpected patterns imply the interactions between culture and biology might be very complicated. It even gets weirder when you think, for example, that females have an edge in things like mathematics and physics in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa, but the exact opposite is true in Europe and the United States. And, of course, none of this means that either men or women should be funneled into a unique type of gendered activity: you can find male nurses who value their social life more than having money and you can find female engineers who are absolute work-a-holics. But it does mean that acting like men and women are psychologically identical is problematic and it's especially problematic when it comes to debate surrounding issues of discrimination. If you assume the social constructivist model, by construction you will attribute any variance due to systematic psychological differences between men and women to social factors. Effectively, if more women prefer people-oriented jobs and privilege their personal lives over their careers and you act to even out the distribution of men and women in STEM fields and in jobs involving 60 hours a week schedules, you're pushing for a policy that oppresses both men and women.


Anyway, who do you think rely on social constructivism? The left. It's not just a stupid hypothesis, it's demonstrably wrong.

 

[Sabre]

Yeah, it's hard to imagine how things can get worse.

U.S. Jobs Top Estimates With 225,000 Gain, Wages Accelerate

(Bloomberg) -- America’s jobs engine roared in January and wage gains rebounded, offering fresh momentum for the economy and a tailwind for President Donald Trump at the start of the election year.

Payrolls increased by 225,000 after an upwardly revised 147,000 gain in December, according to Labor Department data Friday that topped economists’ estimates. The jobless rate edged up to 3.6%, still near a half-century low and reflecting more Americans entering the workforce, while average hourly earnings climbed 3.1% from a year earlier.

The figures help support the president’s description of a “booming” job market during this week’s State of the Union address. While Boeing Co.’s production halt on the 737 Max airplane and the coronavirus outbreak are likely to weigh on the economy in coming months, a resolution of those issues by midyear could perk up growth just before voters head to the polls in November.

A strong labor market and record-high stock prices have helped boost Americans’ views of their finances to all-time highs. Nearly six in 10 Americans say they are better off now than they were a year ago, as 74% said they will be even better off next year, according to a Gallup poll out earlier this week.

“If the job market continues to perform as it is today on election day, it should be a tailwind to the president’s re-election,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. He cautioned, though, that the labor market in swing states will be more important to Trump’s prospects, as places like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin have showed weakness related to manufacturing.

But they fairly point out two things that can affect the U.S. economy in coming months - Boeing Co.’s troubled 737 Max airplane and fears of the coronavirus spreading

Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

 

[TheEconomist]

There are definitely civil pundits on both sides.

What I identified was a broad tendency. Where are people on the left calling out the violence of Antifa? Where are people on the left objecting when radicals demand that conservatives be censored? I recall a moment where Ben Shapiro was debating an issue involving transgender people on television and because he refused to comply with the demands of everyone there to use the prefered pronoun of a transperson, he was insulted and he was threatened of assault by the transperson in question. Not only did the host not object to the threat of violence, but he actually legitimated the threat of violence on account that Shapiro was being offensive. Where was the left then?

My comment reflects my experience. I sometimes feel like I'm one of the only person on the left who still cares about freedom of speech and who thinks that trying to enforce ideological purity through violence is unacceptable. But that might be simply because I happened to have seen mostly radicals on the left and mostly moderates with the conservative camp. But I can tell you it doesn't feel like that... It feels like a lot of people on the left are perfectly content letting absolute lunatics normalize Nazi tactics.

Trump is a racist, who barely bothers to cover it up. The people who attended the Charlottesville rally were not mainstream conservatives who were nostalgic for statues of Robert E. Lee, they were hard right wing-nuts who chanted "Jews Will Not Replace Us."

There are people on both side of this issue who are perfectly fine people. Many conservatives pointed out that trying to clense US history isn't exactly desirable, even when some moments were obviously wrong. You should also be able to tell by now that I have absolutely no respect for either the radials on the far left or the white supremacists who went after each other in Charlottesville. So what? One doesn't prevent the other... Besides, you still have not explained why the hell would Donald Trump call Antifa "fine people." They're not nice people. They are low level domestic terrorists. And, as far as I can see, what you are busy doing is putting words in the mouth of other people. As far as I can see, what is going on is

(1) Donald Trump isn't talking to the dying breed of white supremacists when he makes offensive comments. He's trying to get people just like you to overreact. Getting people on the left to overplay their hands works like clockwork;
(2) He's not going after racists because there is not enough of them, but the racists are trying to use conservatives to normalize their opinions. That actually can work to the advantage of racists groups;

So, you're more or less wasting your time. If you're trying to sell the Orange Man Bad narrative, that won't work. I don't peculiarly like the man, but the epidemic of Trump Derangement Syndrom forces me to place the bar extremely high. Short of catching him openly siding with racists people, forget it: I won't believe you.

Among partisans, neither side tolerates the other well. There's quite a bit of research on that, by the way. One typical indicator is tolerance for intraparty marriages, which has dropped on both sides over the years. As researcher Lynn Vavreck points out, "In 1958, 33 percent of Democrats wanted their daughters to marry a Democrat, and 25 percent of Republicans wanted their daughters to marry a Republican. But by 2016, 60 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Republicans felt that way." So no, there is no significant surfeit of tolerance exclusively on the right. Not even close.

You see, you're looking at only one dimension of the problem. What I did say is that if you ask around, conservatives are likelier to be willing to maintain a friendship with someone with a liberal point of view than the opposite. Besides, go tell all of that to Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubbin and the very long list of people who have experienced first hand how the left handles political disagreements. Mainstream conservatives do not mount protests to get people fired or to de-platform liberal speakers. It's not Denis Prager who made a scene about a liberal conducting an orchestra, it's a handful of musicians who did that. You know what the demonized Denis Prager had to say about music? That it shouldn't be about politics.

Do you know why I admire these people? Because they will have a discussion, even with people who treat them very unfairly. Prager earned my respect the day he held a conference on his radio show, debating with someone who called him a rape apologist because he once made a simple suggestion to married women: they could themselves and of their own accord try to sexually please their husband, even when they're not too much into it, that it would likely get the guy to reciprocate in other ways. The accusation wasn't fair.

 

[TheEconomist]

It is the concept not actual specific research in that "case study".

It's not a case study. It's literally decades of research and thousands of articles. And the concept is specific to financial markets.

 

[SheWolf]

Ah yes those tax cuts that were going to send the economy into the stratosphere and push Corps to add 1,000's of jobs.. I remember AT&T saying if those cuts were made they'd hire 1,000's... Instead it turns out lately they've fired 10,000's of employees.

I'm sure their execs are still making millions though.

I am still waiting on him to give everybody health insurance, cheaper and better coverage.

 

[washunut]

I see what you’re saying. But on the other hand, I think many of these Trump supporters think that the fact that Trump can be so shockingly rude, boorish, shameless, and arrogant just proves his manhood, and the fact that no one is rude back to him just shows how much a p—-y these rivals are. Like a fifth grade schoolyard bully, these folks may not understand anything but a good solid punch in the nose.

That’s why I am a little ambivalent about Pelosi’s ripping up of trumps speech. Yes, it was unprecedented, rude, and classless. And yet, it was right out of Trump’s playbook. It’s hard to be in a pigpen with a pig and not get yourself a little muddy.

I can see your point as well. But as someone one said. If you believe in and eye for an eye .... We would all be blind and toothless.

If democrats were looking to pick off independents like myself who hates the way Trump acts, acting as boorish as he is seems counterproductive.

 

[washunut]

Trumpers can't become anymore entrenched.

The mistake folks like you make is that not every Trump voters is entrenched. An election is the choice between two people. Acting as poorly as he does lessens the impact of his poor behaviour.

 

[ataraxia]

What you have here is a disagreement over what aspect of the problem should have precedence. In all fairness, coverage of pre-existing conditions is costly and there absolutely are problems with it. In particular, the whole point of insurance is to subsidize unhealthy people at the expense of healthy people. Obviously, the whole point is that you generally don't know if you will pay for insurance you will never use or if you will end up being a costly subscriber. In a competitive market, there is a way to get people with pre-existing conditions or high health risks covered: firms would simply impose a large premium to compensate for expected costs and the risks they undertake.

I think the difference in worldview comes down to a difference of thinking about healthcare as a commodity like any other good or service, versus as a basic human right. if you do not have enough money to buy expensive jewelry or buy a luxury car, you can’t afford it. That’s fine. It’s OK to tell that person to work a little bit harder so they can afford to buy the things they want.

But if a four-year-old who happens to have been born a poor family, unexpectedly gets diagnosed with brain cancer, it’s a little harder to just tell him and his family “tough luck. You should work a little harder next time.”

The idea of healthcare as being something quite distinct from any other goods or services is not a new one. It was spearheaded by the United States in the universal declaration of human rights back in 1948. It seems to me that any government that cannot protect such basic security of its citizens is not worthy of the name. That’s not a free government. That’s just an incompetent one.

Is the idea of approaching healthcare as a basic service of government, like the military, rather than just another commodity, make sense economically? Well, it seems just about every developed country in the world which has adopted a system of universal healthcare has seen massive improvements in his public health, along with the subsequent improvements in economic productivity which comes from having a healthier society. They are spending less per capital and have better public health statistics.

One of the latest dramatic examples of this has been Thailand, which has recently adopted a system of universal healthcare for its citizens, with dramatic success.

What Thailand can teach the world about universal healthcare | Health revolution | The Guardian

I think one reason we Are having such trouble with that here in this country, is that we as Americans have less of a sense of solidarity with each other then other countries. We are more fractured, along long racial lines, rural versus urban, young versus old, North versus South, East versus Midwest versus west. So the sense of empathy and solidarity with our fellow Americans is less.

Is it evil for insurance companies to want to refuse to cover pre-existing conditions because it will eat into their profits? Well, that’s a difficult question. They are in it to make money. So it is hard to fault them for not wanting to not take on high-risk patients. But the whole purpose of healthcare is to take care of sick people, not make money. This is not working out because the free market is not designed to address the problem we are trying to deal with here, which is to have a healthier society. these companies are working in a broken system. That is why it seems to me that healthcare, among all economic sectors, should be taken out of the free market system. This is one of the rare situations where the ends and purposes of what we as a society want and need, and what the free market wants to provide, are not aligned.

And our public health statistics reflects it.

The free market is great. But it is not a magic cure-all that can just be blindly applied to all problems to fix them.

 

[danielpalos]

What you have here is a disagreement over what aspect of the problem should have precedence. In all fairness, coverage of pre-existing conditions is costly and there absolutely are problems with it. In particular, the whole point of insurance is to subsidize unhealthy people at the expense of healthy people. Obviously, the whole point is that you generally don't know if you will pay for insurance you will never use or if you will end up being a costly subscriber. In a competitive market, there is a way to get people with pre-existing conditions or high health risks covered: firms would simply impose a large premium to compensate for expected costs and the risks they undertake.

Now, you can complain that it's not fair, but then you have two solutions: (1) rely on private citizens to pick up the tab voluntarily through community organizations and the likes or (2) you use the full power of the State to coerce insurers into doing what you judge to be necessary. You give me an example of something you think to be evil, somehow not being very concerned about the fact that you're the one backing up coercion. Right here, you have a perfectly legitimate reason to not like any of those programs. That doesn't make libertarians evil by any stretch of the imagination: they just disagree with you about what moral principle should take precedence. If you move to more conservative people, you might not get only a libertarian impulse, but you will get people who generally dislike the whole idea of giving power to the government. Part of the issues surrounding the ACA was that it requires community ratings to make coverage of very unhealthy people reasonably priced, a mandatory subscription to make sure healthy people aren't pushed out of the risk pool and a subsidy to low income people to make sure you don't force people to pay for insurance with the money they use to buy the only sandwhich they will eat today...

There might be a private interest among insurance firms to lobby against all of the above because it would be more profitable for them, but that doesn't make all people who agree with the proposal evil. Moreover, it doesn't make politicians liars: clearly, some people would truly get a better deal without the government meddling in the insurance market on account that they aren't very risky clients. Of course, that would also mean some people who are big risks or who already suffer from health problems would have worst deals... I don't see a peculiar reason why someone would be evil to side with the former as opposed to the later group of people. More to the point, what eactly makes (2) so much better than (1)? It's not like you would go from something is being done for those people to absolutely nothing is being done for those people. Some people would certainly take action to tackle that problem even if the government isn't doing it.


Finally, you should not that someone could actually believe that you might be the evil one here, that it's all about digging into the pockets of other people and choosing on behalf of everyone how those funds should be used. It would probably be unfair, but I don't see how that is more unfair than what you just did.

I always thought of insurance as a risk management tool than a "subsidy for the unhealthy".

And, solving simple poverty via existing legal and physical infrastructure in a manner that promotes equality and equal protection of the law, "must be fair".

 

[danielpalos]

It's not a case study. It's literally decades of research and thousands of articles. And the concept is specific to financial markets.

The data may be specific for that specific research just like we have particular powers not just general powers in our Constitution. Our Founding Fathers were using object orientation before the Information Age gave us the term. And, correcting for the deleterious capital effects of capitalism's natural rate of unemployment in a market friendly manner must be more efficient than our current regime.

Efficient market hypothesis is simply that. A hypothesis concerning markets that are affected by finance or lack thereof, and how they may be more efficient.

 

[What if...?]

I don't think many Americans have noticed a slowing economy if it even actually exists. Kinda a like the global warming hoax people don't care they just go about living their lives.

They're generally ignorant.

Like believing wages are up while not understanding how big a bump the minimum wage increases they screamed against contributed to that increase.

Or doing the math that shows the tariffs ate up that increase.

Remember, its Consumer "confidence", which is an emotional metric, not a mathematical one.

 

[What if...?]

not unless it crashes, and maybe not even then. even if there's a crash, he can say that the economy is actually doing better than ever and that Democrats are responsible for the horrible crash in the same sentence. his cult will consider that to be 3d chess.

Yeah. Never thought I could lose that much respect for that many people this quickly.

 

[What if...?]

Hmmm...

I wonder what would have happened to the economy if that Queen of the Trump haters...Pelosi...hadn't sat on the USMCA for a year?

I wonder what would have happened to the economy if the Fed had taken Trump's advice way back in 2017 and reduced interest rates?

I wonder what would have happened to the economy if the rest of the government had supported Trump?

The fact that Trump...in the face of constant opposition from the rest of the government...has managed to boost our economy as much as he has is undeniable evidence that he knows what he's doing...and what he wants to do.

He needs support instead of opposition.

Still following the same line on all the graphs since Obama.

So at best you can say trump didn't **** it up.

Yet.