• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

Walmart workers demand better wages

It depends on how much I was making. I am self-employed these days via a few different enterprises. In my worldview, labor is the most significant cost that is malleable. I would prefer doctors make less rather than we start running needles through the dishwasher, because that has not worked out so well for places like China. It is not always a matter of cutting what someone today makes. It is a matter of time--having pay scales and not allowing the next generation to shoulder as much of the burden in exchange for lower wages over their career.

I don't know who is suggesting that we start running needles through the dishwasher. I'd rather we reign in medical malpractice and get rid of insurance companies before we start talking about how much doctors should make.
 
How are you going to control the latter three without more of the first one?

You can reign in 2&4 by protecting doctors in courts. There is a difference between laws and regulations. Overconsumption is more or less a product of the other three.
 
It depends on how much I was making. I am self-employed these days via a few different enterprises. In my worldview, labor is the most significant cost that is malleable.
Since the topic is the pay of Walmart workers, they should just suck it up to afford the rest of us low prices... correct?
 
Why? ........

Because if I were getting an insane amount of dough for writing prescriptions, I might would be willing to take a pay cut. It isn't like I never do anything for free or at a loss out of the goodness of my stone-cold heart. If student loans are a burden and that burden could be removed by taking less pay over a career then it seems like a sound exchange to me.
 
You can reign in 2&4 by protecting doctors in courts. There is a difference between laws and regulations. Overconsumption is more or less a product of the other three.

If doctors were state employees they might just enjoy some immunity.
 
It depends on how much I was making. I am self-employed these days via a few different enterprises. In my worldview, labor is the most significant cost that is malleable.
Since the topic is the pay of Walmart workers, they should just suck it up to afford the rest of us low prices... correct?

Or apparently go to college for all those years, take on all the debt, and become down-trodden doctors. Not every job is a career job and not every employer is one who has a duty to provide for you for life just because you are capable of pushing buggies across the parking lot. These are low skill jobs that merit low wages. It is an incentive for people to seek out better jobs and acquire the skills to get them. Lord forbid somebody take some risk or initiative when they can live forever off the backs of those who did take risks and show initiative if they whine loud enough and often enough to politicians who want to buy their support with other people's money.
 
"The claim that HMO's are more 'efficient' than the fee-for-service (FFS) plans they replaced is typically based on one of two research errors," said Sullivan. "Either the study didn't take into account higher HMO administrative costs, and only looked at cuts in hospital or doctor care, or it didn't take into account factors like cherry-picking healthier patients or cost-shifting to other payers as an explanation for lower premiums."

Claim That HMO's Save Money Is Little More Than "Folklore," Health Affairs Study Finds | Physicians for a National Health Program

Seems to me your moving to a different issue. Direct me to where i said HMOs were more efficient. I said there would be people who would not be able to afford healthcare absent insurance (third party payers).
 
Because if I were getting an insane amount of dough for writing prescriptions, I might would be willing to take a pay cut. It isn't like I never do anything for free or at a loss out of the goodness of my stone-cold heart. If student loans are a burden and that burden could be removed by taking less pay over a career then it seems like a sound exchange to me.

Not that I disagree that salaries in collages are out of control, but although it may be fine for you to espouse cutting your own salary in such an altruistic way, you can only speak for yourself ultimately. Just trying to look at it evenly.
 
Not that I disagree that salaries in collages are out of control, but although it may be fine for you to espouse cutting your own salary in such an altruistic way, you can only speak for yourself ultimately. Just trying to look at it evenly.

Perhaps you miss the point. It is not "Hey give us a third of your money back". What I am saying is that in a single-payer system for healthcare, you engage in a quid pro quo where the student saves a ton of worry and expense on the front side that will be repaid through their work for the system on the backside. Lawyers who work for the government very often get student loan forgiveness as part of their service or else nobody could afford to work for legal services/public defenders offices at the price they currently do. Teachers will move out to teach in poor areas in exchange for student loan forgiveness. It is what we are already doing in other professions on the backside. If there is a doctor shortage you just do it on the frontside.
 
Perhaps you miss the point. It is not "Hey give us a third of your money back". What I am saying is that in a single-payer system for healthcare, you engage in a quid pro quo where the student saves a ton of worry and expense on the front side that will be repaid through their work for the system on the backside. Lawyers who work for the government very often get student loan forgiveness as part of their service or else nobody could afford to work for legal services/public defenders offices at the price they currently do. Teachers will move out to teach in poor areas in exchange for student loan forgiveness. It is what we are already doing in other professions on the backside. If there is a doctor shortage you just do it on the frontside.


Or we could expose the greed, and graft among the Ivory tower keepers that are holding students by the ankles and shaking them....I am not one that believes that increased governmental control over new graduates is a good thing in a free society.
 
Or we could expose the greed, and graft among the Ivory tower keepers that are holding students by the ankles and shaking them....I am not one that believes that increased governmental control over new graduates is a good thing in a free society.

I am not one to believe that a government that is providing free insurance to millions of Americans does not have enough skin in the game to pretty much demand and get whatever it wants if it is so inclined.
 
Or we could expose the greed, and graft among the Ivory tower keepers that are holding students by the ankles and shaking them....I am not one that believes that increased governmental control over new graduates is a good thing in a free society.

If you only knew that greed and graft is mostly in the private sector, you might have more support among educators.
 
If you only knew that greed and graft is mostly in the private sector, you might have more support among educators.


When educators start doing their darn jobs, instead of indoctrinating our youth to churn out future socialists, then I'll support them more.

How about this Joe, you support this?:


An animated video produced by a California teachers union uses the crude imagery of a rich man urinating on common folks to decry what narrator Ed Asner claims is rich people’s refusal to pay their share of taxes.The crude footage is part of a “Tax the rich: An animated fairy tale,” an eight-minute video written and directed by California Federation of Teachers’ communications director Fred Glass. In it, Asner describes a mythical land that seems to represent the U.S. and how it financed its services. He says the rich sought to evade taxes and put their money into “Wall Street” – yet another clue to the real identity of the storybook country.


Read more: California teachers union video shows rich man urinating on poor to make taxes case | Fox News
 
Last edited:
Seems to me your moving to a different issue. Direct me to where i said HMOs were more efficient. I said there would be people who would not be able to afford healthcare absent insurance (third party payers).

Well.... how can they make health care costlier, and make it more affordable at the same time? :roll:
 
It depends on how much I was making. I am self-employed these days via a few different enterprises. In my worldview, labor is the most significant cost that is malleable.

Or apparently go to college for all those years, take on all the debt, and become down-trodden doctors. Not every job is a career job and not every employer is one who has a duty to provide for you for life just because you are capable of pushing buggies across the parking lot. These are low skill jobs that merit low wages. It is an incentive for people to seek out better jobs and acquire the skills to get them. Lord forbid somebody take some risk or initiative when they can live forever off the backs of those who did take risks and show initiative if they whine loud enough and often enough to politicians who want to buy their support with other people's money.

Well at least your consistent. I probably would've trashed you like no tomorrow if you honestly think that the one of the highest skilled professions is overpaid and the most uneducated jobs is underpaid.
 
If doctors were state employees they might just enjoy some immunity.

I just don't understand why it has to come to that. But a single payer system would be better than what we have now, and sure as hell would be 1000 times better than what Obamacare is going to bring us.

But, I'd personally much rather doctors run the show, considering they are.... you know... the actual health care experts.
 
Because if I were getting an insane amount of dough for writing prescriptions, I might would be willing to take a pay cut. It isn't like I never do anything for free or at a loss out of the goodness of my stone-cold heart. If student loans are a burden and that burden could be removed by taking less pay over a career then it seems like a sound exchange to me.

If you are getting an insane amount of dough for writing prescriptions, you are probably committing fraud.

Its not like I was ever suggesting that we shouldn't combat fraud. Primary care doctors should be paid based on how many patients they have and how much time they spend with their patients. A primary care doctor can still make $200,000 a year by simply charging 800 patents $50 a month for unlimited visits, after you take other expenses into account. It might get more complicated with severe treatments, but I'm confident we can figure out ways to make it affordable for everyone if we eliminate insurance companies out of the picture and lower the number of patents being submitted into urgent care in the first place by utilizing better primary care. What we may end up getting... is a network of doctors acting like what we call an insurance company, but it would be at a lower cost due to less spending on paperwork/bureaucracy/overhead etc.
 
Thats what happens when you play with fire.

Yes .... And Greece was wrong to do that, as was spain ... when you deregulate the financial industry that's what happens.

I do have a say in those decisions. I can say, "my value is more than that, so I will find other work." If I choose to continue to work there, then that is defined as a choice to go along with the decisions being made. And if they choose not to listen to what I have to say, then either I have not made myself valuable enough to have a say or it is up to me to hold myself to a higher standard and seek employment elsewhere.

I do not have to literally vote on my own salary to have a say in how I am paid.

Choices and decisions are always made with the backdrop of the insitutional framework ... and you, as a worker, you'd have much more choice and much more market power in the workplace if the institutional framework with economic democracy.

But you're happy just with the ability to choose masters ... thats fine.
 
It was also rejected by the Republican Party as a whole. And I agree with them, it is corporate welfare to insurance companies, something Democrats are supposed to be "against."

Those procedures would be less costly without the wasteful spending on insurance companies and malpractice insurance. Plus, because primary care and pharmaceuticals can be provided at a cheaper rate without the insurance companies, those costly procedures would be a lot less neccesary.

The republican party rejected it on political grounds, not ideological ... They rejected it because Obama proposed it, but they all were FOR it a couple years earlier ... Personally when Obama scrapped single payer and then fought AGAINST the public option, thats when I realized he was 100% full of ****, He was no better than a republican that doesn't hate gay people, thats basically it.

You're not gonna get me defending Obama care, I oppose the mandate. Insurance companies and malpractice insurance are all part of the capitalist market, so I don't know what your complaining about ... unless you're calling for more government regulation.

It isn't the service that is costly, it is the excessive regulations, fraud, and expensive malpractice costs of the service that is driving up costs. Single payer isn't an awful idea in my opinion, its just not as good as having the doctors running the show.

Doctors DO run the show under single payer ... its just that cost isn't part of the factor.

What drives up the cost are things like intellectual property, pharmecutical cartelization, the profit motive, insurance gouging, and so on, almost all of it is internal to the capitalist market.
 
No, not really, you are way too vague to have any relevance with that sort of snarky answer...I am asking because when the argument is at its hight, those like you that think they know what they are talking about, tend to arrogantly tell those of us arguing against you that we don't understand what socialism is....So I asked. Not surprising that you gave an answer that in any philosophy class would earn you an "F" for uttering such a simplistic, and wrong answer.

I'm using Socialism as a broad term to call what was advocated from Bakunin to lenin, from St. Simon to Social Democrats and so on .... What they ALL have in common is an idea that the economy should be run for the good of the public or controlled by the workers, i.e. economic democracy.

Now, in any of those three definitions that I laid out for you, do you see anything in there that is the movement of the hard leftists in the democrat party, and or Obama are aspiring for? I sure do if not all of it.

The whole thing of the State doesn't work, because you're ignoring the majority of socailists, which are left-libertarians, anarchists, cooperativists, syndicalists, market socialists and so on, who don't see a major role for the state ... Also the Marxian definition of socialism is very specific and used very sparingly, and doesn't really fit the broad definition.

The closest correct definitnios are the Oxford one and the Wikipedia one, although I would'nt use "ownership" since you want to be philisophically accurate, since what most socialists advocate isn't social "ownership" as the word is used in Capitalism, but rather socail control .... WHich is basically democracy, i.e. the American public doesn't "OWN" American ... but through the democratic process (at least in theory) they control the policy.

As far as the democratic party ... I don't know anyone who is calling for social control of the means of production and distribution or anything like that, the only thing I can think of are those who advocate a public bank, which is very few, and single payer, again very few ... and although those are "socailist" policies, one could say, they are ones that are accepted by most of the world, especially single payer.

As far as Obama ... He's not only not a socialist he's a neo-liberal ... he did everything to make sure the financial system stayed fully private and mostly unregulated, his healthcare was the opposite of socialist, it was corporatist, hell al the peopel he has in his economic team are the same people Bush had, plus the freaking CEO of GE ... Yeah ... because a socailsits would bring in executives from Goldman Sachs and General Electric into his top economic team.
 
The republican party rejected it on political grounds, not ideological ... They rejected it because Obama proposed it, but they all were FOR it a couple years earlier ... Personally when Obama scrapped single payer and then fought AGAINST the public option, thats when I realized he was 100% full of ****, He was no better than a republican that doesn't hate gay people, thats basically it.

You're not gonna get me defending Obama care, I oppose the mandate. Insurance companies and malpractice insurance are all part of the capitalist market, so I don't know what your complaining about ... unless you're calling for more government regulation.



Doctors DO run the show under single payer ... its just that cost isn't part of the factor.

What drives up the cost are things like intellectual property, pharmecutical cartelization, the profit motive, insurance gouging, and so on, almost all of it is internal to the capitalist market.

Might I remind you, that health insurance in your country wouldn't be possible without OUR pharmaceutical companies.

But I generally agree that insurance gouging is to blame. Insurance companies really add nothing, except they are able to monopolize and rig the system to drive up costs by forcing people to buy it.
 
Might I remind you, that health insurance in your country wouldn't be possible without OUR pharmaceutical companies.

But I generally agree that insurance gouging is to blame. Insurance companies really add nothing, except they are able to monopolize and rig the system to drive up costs by forcing people to buy it.

ANd pharmaceutical companies all over ther world. (Btw, they arn't YOUR pharmaceutical companies, they have no loyalty to the United States at all, nor does their wealth benefit the UNited States at all).

And those pharmaceutical companies would'nt exist without publically funded research, and patents and so on, and would be much better run as publically accountable not for profit companies.
 
You're not gonna get me defending Obama care, I oppose the mandate. Insurance companies and malpractice insurance are all part of the capitalist market, so I don't know what your complaining about ... unless you're calling for more government regulation.
NO.... insurance companies are protected by the government, not the free market.

Malpractice insurance is a result of individuals being greedy and lawyers abusing the lack of knowledge about the human body and pathophysiology among the general population (jury).

Getting rid of one requires less government regulation, getting rid of the other would just a result of completely restructuring our civil court system, which we definitely need to do.
 
Back
Top Bottom