• 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!

The 53%: We are NOT Occupy Wall Street

If they are jr enlisted and coming to you, there is a good possibility that they are going to be those most likely to have credit card debt, since you are the financial counselor.

by and large they don't come to me. you aren't allowed to be a jr enlisted in my general vicinity for long without me sitting you down for a minimum of half an hour to go through this stuff.

I have never had a credit card. I knew few young sailors who did. Most lived off of their paychecks. We had some who would buy cars that were way out of their budget, but that was actually rare.

well it is nice to be at sea and not spending money. i saved a good chunk of change on the MEU. but the "buying cars beyond their budget" is the norm for Army and Marine Corps, just as it is for most Americans.

Which is not reasonably going to happen in this country. And shouldn't happen.

it will happen if we are lucky and manage to get it in early enough. otherwise healthcare costs threaten to destroy our system of governance and we are left with the ugly choice of them or us.

And, no, Medicaid is not available to most adults. Despite what some may believe, Medicaid is only available, for the most part, in most states, to certain people, such as the blind, aged, and disabled, children and pregnant women, and certain adults with children in their household may be eligible to get Medicaid.

medicaid is not available to most adults that live with their spouse and work full time. furthermore, medicaid is actually available to a large portion of the population who do not sign up for it. furthermore (and this should, perhaps, clue us in on the efficacy of UHC), the people who are on Medicaid generally do worse than people who have no health insurance in the first place.

There are a lot of stipulations on this though, including a financial assessment that takes into account every bit of money you have and possibly anything that you could reasonably sell for value.

gosh, surely you don't mean that it incentivizes you to keep your income and productivity below a certain level?

Where exactly are they going to move to?

every other nation in the world with the exception of Japan has spent the last decade or so working to make their tax structures more beneficial to business than America's. and Japan was scheduled to make that move themselves until the earthquake/tsunami. the corporate tax rate in Canada is less than half ours.

And how are most companies honestly going to make more money limiting their business in America?

Because we make it more expensive for them to do so, and we make them less efficient than their competitors if they try. right now, if you are a business in America, and you make profits overseas, we don't allow you to pull it back in and reinvest it here in teh States without paying that 35% corporate tax. we are the only industrialized nation I am aware of that is still this stupid - it means that you have to be sure that the return on investment here in the states will be 36% greater than those same funds invested overseas to justify bringing it back - we have effectively put a 35% handicap on ourselves.

ah... but if you just cross the border, up into Canada, your tax burden falls, your regulatory shocks fall, and you can efficiently allocate your resources wherever you wish, allowing you to be just as nimble as your competition.

Isn't America the biggest consumers?

the insanely indebted American consumer?

Plus, wouldn't that actually help Americans? We are likely going to need those jobs.

we are talking about large job losses here, not gains.

Or the poor can buy American products that wouldn't cost as much.

unfortunately since those products are made by American citizens and American companies, they will cost more. If you want to hire an American. well, F YOU, we've go about 10K worth of regulatory burden for you to fill out and cover before you pay him a mandated dime. and then we're going to tax and regulate the both of you some more for the crime of producing something worth selling. there is a reason much of our production went overseas, and that reason is that it became too expensive to do it here.

Not to mention, there definitely could be other measures put into place to reduce the impact those increases.

such as what - massive subsidies? when we are already borrowing 40 cents on the dollar to run current operating expenses? and who is going to give us the money, now that we have started a trade war with China?

At least we agree on something here.

:) they are the bright, daffodil covered meadows in our dark woods.

Education costs are high because a) people are told they need a higher education to get a job and then they end up educating themselves about things that are worthless to most jobs, b) the schools want more students, so they can make more money, so on top of all the many expenses they already have, they also pay to impress school raters/rankers to get their schools at the top, and c) there are a waterfall of reasons why higher education is so high, and little has to do with the government offering help to those who cannot afford it (correlation does not equal causation).

that last is incorrect - government subsidization has the effect of increasing prices, and that is precisely what we see. just as government direct and indirect subsidization helped give us a housing bubble, it is now giving us an education bubble - and in both cases they justified pushing people to get further into debt as "helping them".

Health costs are high because everyone wants a bigger piece of the pie. Doctors want their huge pay. Pharmaceutical companies want to charge massive amounts for their drugs. Insurance companies want to make their money. (Again, correlation does not equal causation.)

this is also incorrect. Insurance companies have to make up for the government mandates that are imposed upon them that force them to make decisions for non-actuarial reasons. Providers have to make up for government underpayments in Medicare and Medicaid, along with mandates that are imposed upon them to provide care with no recompense. Pharmaceutical companies have to make up for the massive production and regulatory burdens that are imposed on them by an insane federal regulatory agency. through it all, the rest of us are in a system where government subsidization of employer provided third-party payment system punishes you to the tune of FICA + your income tax rate if you try to buy insurance that is portable and covers catastrophic needs only; meaning that there is no incentive on the part of anyone not to overuse the medical provision system that is desperate to have as many people overuse as possible to make up for the costs imposed on them by government.

If other countries can work a UHC system that costs their own government so much less per person, then it is not unreasonable to say that we should be able to do it too.

yes. they do this by denying people care, and letting them die in larger numbers if they get seriously sick. go spend some time with the cancer survival rates and waiting times in Britain v the US.

And again, we have black or white understanding. There are many causes for the poverty in this country, and it is not just behaviorally driven

no, it is simply mostly behaviorally driven.

I don't think anyone who says that people should be forced to face "the full consequences of their poor decisions" really understands exactly what effect that would really have on this country.

national survival. like raising a child to think he can never be punished, only to watch him be astonished when as a young adult he is hauled off to prison - we do not help people by hiding the consequences of their decisions from them.
 
I am part of the 99% who are not filthy rich and sympathize with the OWS movement although I am not part of it.
I am part of the 53% who pay federal taxes and always have been a taxpayer.

One, does not exclude the other.
 
the 53% " we will continue to sit on our hands and complain at our TV set"
 
That's exactly it. They are acting as if their hardships are something for this country to be proud of.

Bull****. Why don't you want a nation where you don't have to work three jobs to survive; where you get an education paid for if you serve your country; and where lazy asses who shuffle money around aren't taxed at a rate half of that of those who actually do real work?

These may be good guys with good work ethic; but they've let machismo take the place of common sense.

This used to be a nation where a 40-hour-a-week job was enough to buy a home, feed a family, and still save for retirement and college for the kids. And that was on ONE salary.

And people run around and act proud of the fact that those things are no longer true and no longer apply to our nation. Hooray! We have to work like dogs just to get by paycheck to paycheck and hope to God we don't come down with a life-threatening illness!!! All so capital gains can be taxed at half the rate of labor!!! Yay for us!!!
Well sure...1 40 hour a week job was OK...to maintain status quo. If you wanted to take life to the next level you had to work harder. But if you are going to wax nastalgic...you sort of have to carry it out...

FAR less women in the workplace...hey...looky there...unemployment is resolved.
FAR less crippled and dependent pets with their hands out and sponging off the government.
FAR less unwed mothers. Far less abortions. Far more instances of men being responsible for their own actions and deeds.
FAR more students actually attending school and graduating from high school with the ability to read, write, and do basic math.
FAR fewer people running around crying about how they "got their bipolar" (or more era specific their manic depression) and someone should take care of them.
FAR less government social programs bankrupting states and the fed.
Oh yes...the good old days.
 
Back
Top Bottom