Helsing posted:

In fact Obama himself has been pretty candid about this at times and described himself as espousing ideas that would have placed him in the Republican party a couple decades ago.

Helsing posted:

And then he was forced to push through a bunch of awful trade deals that effectively give corporate tribunals a veto over national legislation.

Helsing posted:

Sure almost the entire labour movement was united against the bill but I trust that the President had their best interests at heart.

Helsing posted:

And hey, he slightly raised marignal tax rates. I mean sure he was trying to cut social security and he forced everyone to buy crapified insurance that in many cases had co-pays so high that people were still filing for bankruptcy when they got ill but you have to understand that passing a bill modeled on a plan from a conservative Republican think tank was actually a historic success.

Helsing posted:

I mean, sure, the entire system has gone into a death spiral of withdrawing companies and rising premiums but no, I don't think that had anything to do with the Democrats losing in 2016. That was because of Russia!

Helsing posted:

What's that you say? Obama oversaw a recovery that went almost exclusively to the 1%? But don't you see it's impossible to distribute gains from growth more evenly (let alone redistribute wealth) because ~*secular stagnation*~ ! Perhaps you'd understand if you had an e-mail notification coming to your phone every time Ezra Klein writes a new article.

rscott posted:

The top 1% captured 91% of the real income growth per family during the 2009-2012 recovery period, with their pre-tax incomes growing 34.7% adjusted for inflation while the pre-tax incomes of the bottom 99% grew 0.8%. Measured from 2009–2015, the top 1% captured 52% of the total real income growth per family, indicating the recovery was becoming less "lopsided" in favor of higher income families. By 2015, the top 10% (top decile) had a 50.5% share of the pre-tax income, close its highest all-time level.

rscott posted:

According to an article in The New Yorker, by 2012, the share of pre-tax income received by the top 1% had returned to its pre-crisis peak, at around 23% of the pre-tax income.

rscott posted:

By 2015, real incomes of bottom 99% have now recovered about two thirds of the losses experienced during the Great Recession from 2007 to 2009.

Clearly economic inequality has returned to those halcyon days of 1996

SaTaMaS posted:

Yes if you start measuring right after a massive drop, you're going to see a big spike. Also as you said "close its highest all-time level"

Which puts them back near the previous peak around 1999

The halcyon days before the crash in 2000 at least

Yes the rich getting richer is bad, but maybe pay attention to the situation that the rest of the world is in before killing off the goose that laid the golden egg

rscott posted:

The peak in income for the top 1% was in 2012, you don't know what the gently caress you're even talking about, just stop.

SaTaMaS posted:

Share of income is a better measure, and that peaked around 2007
http://www.cbpp.org/income-concentration-at-the-top-has-risen-sharply-since-the-1970s-1

axeil posted:

i'm in the industry and i'm gonna stop you right there and say that you have no idea what the gently caress you're talking about.

were there homes foreclosed on where there was basically no documentation/proof? yes. but those were outliers in the group. usually it was a case where both the servicer and the borrower knew what was up but since the servicer couldn't prove it they were SOL. the majority of the loans that were robo-signed would've been proper so long as they didn't have a robot doing it.

a lot of money went into fixing the problems around documentation and robo-signing with lots of nasty downstream effects that didn't get play in the press because they were ideology neutral. things like the FHA taking a massive bath on its insured properties because its lenders were unable to foreclose for years and so instead of getting a house in mostly good condition, they got a house 2 years later that was a hole in the ground. that ends up costing the government a lot of money since the FHA is now unable to sell the home and has to write off the asset as a total loss. if that happened even a few times it's a multi-million dollar loss to the government and i know that it happened a lot more than "just a few times"

nothing is simple. anyone saying all the problems in america are caused by X and if we just did Y things would be fine have a child-like understanding of the economy. poo poo's complicated and casting heroes and villains will make you feel good but won't solve any problems.

Pollyanna posted:

New Year's Resolution: figure out how to make money off our hosed up system.

ToxicSlurpee posted:

Get rid of all your morals.

JeffersonClay posted:

this part

SaTaMaS posted:

SaTaMaS posted:

That’s not really how a court system works. Just because a company can challenge a country’s laws doesn’t mean it is likely they will win

Pollyanna posted:

New Year's Resolution: figure out how to make money off our hosed up system.

ToxicSlurpee posted:

Get rid of all your morals.

SaTaMaS posted:

medical bankruptcies still happen almost as often under single-payer healthcare

Pollyanna posted:

I don't care about the marginal growths and thingies and whatever, all I know is top 1% bottom 99% etc etc Bernie was right. Anything that evens out the inequality and makes it so that we aren't amazingly hosed would be great.

axeil posted:

"i don't care about facts or anything else objective but i'm upset and i want my feelings validated!"

Pollyanna posted:

I had a (pretty uneducated) thought. If we do see another crash and depression, does that present an opportunity to buy up a bunch of cheap stock, or is that inadvisable? If everyone has the same idea, won't that cause stock prices to rise back up?

SaTaMaS posted:

Still better than COBRA, also medical bankruptcies still happen almost as often under single-payer healthcare. If it's so bad, why are so many people buying it?

Doc Hawkins posted:

Relax, we're developers. As capital continues to slosh around in search of returns, and people become more and more normalized to doing things online, the livelihood for lucky assholes like us almost assured. Heavily diversified after tax accounts are still a good option for people who can trust their own salaries.

The real problem is all the people who don't have that choice, who we can help through joint political action! And like, running free neighborhood breakfasts.

e: first draft sounded complacent, even smug, and that's not how i feel

SaTaMaS posted:

Still better than COBRA, also medical bankruptcies still happen almost as often under single-payer healthcare. If it's so bad, why are so many people buying it?

forkboy84 posted:

Still an amazing system and the idea that the worlds wealthiest nation doesn't think it can handle it is absurd.

bird food bathtub posted:

A lot of Americans want it. poo poo tons of Americans want it. Phrased right to avoid the propaganda-created responses to key words I think it crosses over to a majority but I'm going off memory on that point.

Those Americans are not the 1% that can go purchase a congressional representative and throw an army of lobbyists at the rest, so in our system they basically don't count and we end up with solutions that are more palatable to the wealthy, or "market based".

Huragok posted:

[citation needed]

SaTaMaS posted:

In Canada, about 15% of bankruptcies are due to medical bills*, while in the US, about 18%-25%** of bankruptcies are due to medical bills

http://www.snopes.com/643000-bankruptcies-in-the-u-s-every-year-due-to-medical-bills/
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-a-budget/263547-the-myth-of-medical-bankruptcy
http://theconversation.com/why-medical-debt-and-bankruptcy-are-growing-problems-35532

rscott posted:

*15% of Canadian seniors

** One study done by a guy publishing in the Wall Street Journal, other estimates place it between 45-60% of bankruptcies in the US

There fixed that so it's actually accurate instead of the intentionally misleading crap you have constantly posted in this thread

quote:

The data revealed that 61% of all debtors carry medical debt and that the average medical debt per debtor in 2013 was US$9,374. Debtors in my sample also reported an average of $55,967 in unsecured debt and annual income of $40,920. Of these, a total of 18% of debtors had medical debt that was greater than half of their total unsecured debt or half of their annual income.

One of the key reasons that people file for bankruptcy is to discharge unsecured debt. If medical bills make up more than half of a person’s unsecured debt or is greater than half of their income, then medical debt is probably a major factor in causing the person to file bankruptcy.

Around 18% of debtors in my sample had medical debt greater than half of their total unsecured debt or annual income, so we can conclude that medical debt was the predominant factor in 18% of the bankruptcies in my sample.

SaTaMaS posted:

In Canada, about 15% of bankruptcies are due to medical bills, while in the US, about 18%-25% of bankruptcies are due to medical bills

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-a-budget/263547-the-myth-of-medical-bankruptcy

quote:

Medical bankruptcy: Fact or fiction?
BY SALLY C. PIPES, PRESIDENT, PACIFIC RESEARCH INSTITUTE - 10/23/12 04:30 PM EDT

quote:

results

In 1999, health administration costs totaled at least $294.3 billion in the United States,
or $1,059 per capita, as compared with $307 per capita in Canada. After exclusions, administration
accounted for 31.0 percent of health care expenditures in the United States
and 16.7 percent of health care expenditures in Canada. Canada’s national health insurance
program had overhead of 1.3 percent; the overhead among Canada’s private insurers
was higher than that in the United States (13.2 percent vs. 11.7 percent). Providers’
administrative costs were far lower in Canada.
Between 1969 and 1999, the share of the U.S. health care labor force accounted for
by administrative workers grew from 18.2 percent to 27.3 percent. In Canada, it grew
from 16.0 percent in 1971 to 19.1 percent in 1996. (Both nations’ figures exclude insurance-industry
personnel.)

conclusions

The gap between U.S. and Canadian spending on health care administration has grown
to $752 per capita. A large sum might be saved in the United States if administrative costs
could be trimmed by implementing a Canadian-style health care system.

Arglebargle III posted:

gently caress I'm levered up to my eyeballs buying stock in mushrooms and you tell me this now?!

Helsing posted:

One of the greatest problems with American medical care is not lack of insurance -- though that is certainly a huge problem, which Obamacare's crapified insurance plans often fail to rectify -- it's massively inflated costs. And Obamacare has failed to deal with that problem. This is one reason why we see people going bankrupt due to medical costs even in cases where they have insurance. Hell, the American government doesn't even allow itself to negotiate drug prices for medicare -- it's literally prohibited by law. If those kinds of bizzare regulations aren't a big flashign red light to you saying the system is fundamentally broken then I really don't know what to tell you.

Not to mention the money that could be saved just by trimming administration costs. There is so much dead weight in the system and of course the Democrats had no interest in trying to get rid of it:

Helsing posted:

This woman is the President of a "think" tank that, by it's own description, "champions freedom, opportunity, and personal responsibility by advancing free-market policy ideas." It even has a "Laffer Center" named after Art loving Laffer, the genius behind Reagonomics. And that article you're citing leans heavily on a "study" by the Fraser Institute. And even that bullshit study, which is coming from an organization that can be expected to juke the stats in whatever way is necessary to reach it's desired conclusion, still has to essentially cheat by including the proviso that many of the medical bankruptcies among Canadian seniors are from problems their insurance doesn't actually cover.

These are not objective or peer reviewed studies they are propaganda pieces produced by think tanks whose only reason for existence is to advance the agenda of the people and corporations who pay into their extremely opaque funding structures. Is there any reason that you would drop these links -- both of which you clearly pulled from the snopes article -- except to try and create the false impression that you did more research than a very cursory google search? Not only are you bolstering your argument in the most clumsy and stupid way possible, you're citing sources that make you sound like a blithering idiot. Next you're probably going to say Obama was in the right for trying to cut social security and then you'll cite Paul Ryan's economic plan.

The actual study behind your claim is here. The first thing you read in the actual study is that this is still a contentious area of research with different researchers producing wildly different findings. Austin's particular findings are an outlier. Warren (writing before Obamacare was implemented) concluded the results were closer to 60%. In another study by Himmelston (2009) finds 62.1% of bankruptcies are medically caused. Other studies varied from the high teens to high twenties as percentages. In general these studies produce numbers that vary depending on methodology or on how you define the object of study.

quote:

The data adduced in this study shows that medical bills are the single largest causal factor in consumer bankruptcy—but not to the degree found in the study cited by President Obama. My study concludes that medical debt is the predominant causal factor in 18% to 26% of all consumer bankruptcies.