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But guys guys, but apparently if I tax someone 5$, and give it to someone else to dig a ditch. All I've done was redistribute the 5$ and creating zero net wealth, just moved it around.  quote:If you take $5 from someone to give to someone else, you increase the total "economic stimulus" by... $0. Bob now has $3 from Bill to spend. A government employee now has $2 to spend. Bill has $5 FEWER to spend.
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Jan 7, 2017 20:42
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What is that dumb quote from?
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Jan 7, 2017 20:47
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:What is that dumb quote from? The top rated comment for a youtube video where Lewis Black briefly described Keynesian stimulus spending.
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Jan 7, 2017 20:49
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People very frequently fail to understand the concept of money's velocity. $1 isn't just $1. If I give somebody $1 for something that money doesn't just vanish into the ether. That person will then spend that on something else. Most of us just don't have millions or billions sitting in the bank doing nothing. Most of us spend the majority of what we earn. That's why taxes ultimately have velocity. The government pays somebody $40,000 to do something and they probably spend at least $30,000 of that, which goes to paying somebody else to do something. Some things the government spends money on aren't profitable by nature but that doesn't mean they're useless. You throw money in a library to have a library not to get more money out of it. Same with schools. Education is a useful thing that doesn't generate profit. It generates skilled people who are good at things. Money paid to the people who staff the library or school has velocity because they go and spend that. It doesn't just vanish but far too many people seem to think that if you tax money the government just gives it to somebody to eat and it vanishes forever. You pay people to build roads because roads are useful and nice to have. Those people then spend that money on other stuff. Government does, in fact, create jobs and taxing the very wealthy increases the velocity of money because of their tendency to just sit on large piles of cash. Nobody knows for sure how much horded money there is in the world but it's in the trillions. Not just a few trillions, either. It can possibly be as high as dozens of trillions just being sat on. That's economically disastrous because that money isn't doing anything other than being a score for some rich guy who has a yacht to keep his yachts on.
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Jan 7, 2017 20:59
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ToxicSlurpee posted:their tendency to just sit on large piles of cash. That surprises me. I would expect it to be spent on equities, bonds, and other instruments. Are they holding cash as a hedge against the crisis we're discussing here?
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Jan 7, 2017 21:03
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Subjunctive posted:That surprises me. I would expect it to be spent on equities, bonds, and other instruments. Are they holding cash as a hedge against the crisis we're discussing here? It's actually pretty complex but a lot of it is just having a high score as well as the power that having a gently caress load of money gives. Raw, spendable wealth is also easier to buy influence with than money tied up in stuff like that. Cash spends. Stocks and bonds don't.
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Jan 7, 2017 21:06
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Having the majority of wealth tied up in financial instruments may provide a marginal benefit to the economy over hoarding it in a mattress somewhere, but it also creates unacceptable risk when we have a basically unregulated financial industry. Either way, it's not being spent on public works projects or much of anything that benefits the economy itself, or the quality of life of the people participating in it.
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Jan 7, 2017 21:14
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Xae posted:That is a non-sequitur if I ever saw one. Automation and Labor savings has gently caress all to do with the current clusterfuck. The point I was making is that workers get thrown out of their jobs all the time and I doubt you kick up much of a fuss when somebody's job gets shipped to China, meaning your impassioned defense of the industry you happen to work in comes off like special pleading. quote:And here is the backstory: This is a strange comment given I immediately outline other reforms that you agree would be beneficial. What you keep missing or refusing to acknowledge is that cost inflation is way less of an issue than lack of care. The United States is an extremely rich and productive society, there is no excuse for the inadequate and often ruinously expensive way it delivers healthcare to most of its citizens. This is a far more pressing issue to address than anything else. Subsequent reforms can deal with cost issues -- and frankly, those cost issues will be much easier to address if the political power of health insurers and providers is broken through government action. This isn't really an economic issues so much as it's a political one. The current system was created through lobbying and rent-seeking activity. Any viable solution will necessarily include curbing the political influence of the industries involved. quote:See these are good ideas because they address the core problem: The cost of providing care. Paying for care is ultimately secondary if it is affordable in the first place. Cracking down on the tech arms race is a huge one too. Hospitals are getting into dick measuring contests over technology and patients are demanding the latest and greatest things, particularly in imaging, even if they don't need it. You don't need a state of the art MRI scan for a routine broken bone, but you'll probably get one in the USA. As I said above, the issue is fundamentally political. And no, the cost of care is absolutely secondary to the need to provision care. "Curb costs and maybe the cost-savings will eventually trickle down to the populace" is not a sufficient solution and your insistence on caring more about the cost than about the fundamental need to give people decent healthcare is downright ghoulish. quote:Just nationalizing the payers is literally the dumbest thing you can do. It is the one thing worse than doing nothing. Because the only thing that happens is shifting a cost that is growing uncontrollably onto the public books. With no cost control and at the current growth rates Medical Care will be 30% of the US economy in 10 years. It is projected to start to drop in ~15 years due to "natural demographic changes". It will be something like 40-45% of the US economy at its height. Nobody has claimed that a unviersal and government provided health insurance system would be a panacea or that it's the only necessary reform. The point is only that it would be a massive improvement over the current system and would also make subsequent reforms far easier to pursue.
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Jan 7, 2017 21:23
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asdf32 posted:Well there is a huge difference between between cost cutting at the system level and a change from private employer based to private individual based policy. The second is disruptive in an administrative sense not an economic sense. Personally, given that single payer isn't on the horizon I think it would be smart reform in the right direction for a few reasons and should theoretically be feasible (though I don't see much movement in that direction). Simple, intuitive and compelling narratives like "let's give everyone access to this highly popular and efficient program so that they don't have to go bankrupt or forgo medical treatment when they get sick" is, in my opinion, a better strategy for mobilizing voters. It's far fetched at the moment but I think one thing that leftists and liberals in the US have lacked in recent years is a longer-term agenda or guiding ideology that goes beyond technocratic tinkering. Having a broadly understood goal like expanding health insurance to the masses rather than trying to force people through economic sanctions into a fundamentally broken market for health insurance is the way to go. As for subsidising employment that isn't the same as trying to keep every parasitic or inefficient job in the country frozen in place. You're right I'm being a bit flippant here but that's mostly because I assume that Xae's "won't somebody think of the jobs?!" argument isn't really in good faith and is, as I said above, just a form of special pleading that he wouldn't extend to other victims of economic change. quote:Bad policy but doctor salaries, even if inflated (it's not clear what the result of this was), are nothing in the context of the cost inflation we've seen. I wasn't suggesting doctor salaries are the main driver of healthcare costs. The point is more to illustrate how economic regulations are mostly driven by the power of various special interests and have only a very limited relationship to economic efficiency. We could have globalized the doctor's profession in much the same way that we've globalized manufacturing supply chains and the result would have been, by textbook economic theory, massive savings for the rest of the economy.
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Jan 7, 2017 21:31
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I was talking to a colleague yesterday who is a contractor and he pays $2200/mo for health insurance for his family of 4. Everything is fine and this is the best we can do.
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Jan 7, 2017 22:04
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A lot of people are going through so much contortion to make Medicare for all sound like a bad idea that they may injure themselves and need healthcare.
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Jan 7, 2017 22:18
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I told someone they were cutting SS. They were happy because this means the gov't will stop stealing his money. Refused to believe my clarifications. Sigh.
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Jan 7, 2017 22:21
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Rated PG-34 posted:I was talking to a colleague yesterday who is a contractor and he pays $2200/mo for health insurance for his family of 4. Everything is fine and this is the best we can do. But don't worry. Good posters in this thread assure us cost is not a problem we should address now.
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Jan 8, 2017 03:00
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Covok posted:I told someone they were cutting SS. They were happy because this means the gov't will stop stealing his money. Refused to believe my clarifications.
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Jan 8, 2017 03:33
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quote:Single Payer is a lovely hill to die on in the United States. CO, a blue state, put single payer on the ballot in 2016. It lost by 80 points. That's a lovely argument. People vote against their best interests all the time. I voted for the Colorado health care plan, because I pay a HELL of a lot more to cover my family of three than what I'd pay under that plan. People are loving idiots who shouldn't be asked to vote on complex, highly technical policies, that's why we vote for representatives to do it for us.
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Jan 8, 2017 03:48
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mycomancy posted:That's a lovely argument. People vote against their best interests all the time. I voted for the Colorado health care plan, because I pay a HELL of a lot more to cover my family of three than what I'd pay under that plan. People are loving idiots who shouldn't be asked to vote on complex, highly technical policies, that's why we vote for representatives to do it for us. And therein lies the problem. if you pay less, and costs are fixed, then someone else pays more. We need to get costs under control. In some cases that means delivering the same care for less money. In other cases it means delivering less care, because a lucrative fee-for-service system combined with a litigious culture encourages enough providers to over-intervene, or to intervene in the wrong ways.
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Jan 8, 2017 03:55
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Raenir Salazar posted:The top rated comment for a youtube video where Lewis Black briefly described Keynesian stimulus spending. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXF7xJP6hW8 I always like Michael Hudson videos. I think he might be going out on a limb here in this one, but the idea of the resurgence of the rentier class does seem to have a pretty good basis. However, his other talks about 'where the money comes from' are fascinating. But once you know the concept that every dollar you have in your pocket is essentially deficit spending by the government the national economy makes more sense.
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Jan 8, 2017 05:42
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Ynglaur posted:And therein lies the problem. if you pay less, and costs are fixed, then someone else pays more. We need to get costs under control. In some cases that means delivering the same care for less money. In other cases it means delivering less care, because a lucrative fee-for-service system combined with a litigious culture encourages enough providers to over-intervene, or to intervene in the wrong ways. cheese fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Jan 8, 2017 |
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Jan 8, 2017 06:27
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Ynglaur posted:And therein lies the problem. if you pay less, and costs are fixed, then someone else pays more. We need to get costs under control. In some cases that means delivering the same care for less money. In other cases it means delivering less care, because a lucrative fee-for-service system combined with a litigious culture encourages enough providers to over-intervene, or to intervene in the wrong ways. How do you propose we get costs under control in the current, private health care market? With a free market approach to healthcare, what incentive is there for a profitable business to cut costs to consumers if they don't have to?
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Jan 8, 2017 07:06
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Consumers will just shop around for the best price while withing in pain and if no one bids an acceptable amount then they'll choose to go without the same way they choose to do without the latest pricey phone upgrade.
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Jan 8, 2017 08:12
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Subjunctive posted:That surprises me. I would expect it to be spent on equities, bonds, and other instruments. Are they holding cash as a hedge against the crisis we're discussing here? Even if it's invested, private wealth always seeks a positive return, so it's only ever invested in things which are expected to be profitable in the relatively short term. The exception here is if a wealthy person takes a personal interest in either a branch of basic research or other long term scientific goal or trying to eradicate a disease or something of that nature. Even in those cases though, the bulk of that person's wealth still remains profit seeking, as a single person is literally unable to personally manage billions of dollars in any kind of effective way. It means that massive amounts of wealth by definition can not be used to do any of a million terribly useful things which would trivially and demonstrably make life better on this planet because you can't make a relatively short term individual profit off of it. Oh and most if not all of the major problems facing humanity are exactly the kind of problems doing those terribly useful things, such as solving hunger and abject poverty, providing access to medical care and curing diseases, developing infrastructure and educating people, would at the least contribute to solving. The other major kinds of problems we have tend to be caused by massive amounts of money being profit seeking (and failing to find adequate returns), such as the financial bubbles of the last 2 decades. Capitalism is a woefully inefficient economic system for improving human lives. Though I will concede it is better than slavery and feudalism.
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Jan 8, 2017 15:21
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Orange Devil posted:Capitalism is a woefully inefficient economic system for improving human lives. Though I will concede it is better than slavery and feudalism.
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Jan 8, 2017 15:47
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cheese posted:Can you really not loving comprehend that if every single American were covered under Medicare, that this would enable us to have significant leverage to negotiate lower rates for a wide variety of services, procedures and medications? Your argument is literally "Single payer would not matter because costs would be the same" when half of the loving point is that single payer gives you a strangle hold over costs. Costs are not fixed. They are not chiseled in the stone of the loving Lincoln Memorial. Medicare doesn't negotiate prices. It sets procedure prices by a formula and it is legally forbidden from negotiating drug prices. You're not describing Medicare for All, you're describing a new program. Xae fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Jan 8, 2017 |
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Jan 8, 2017 16:28
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Orange Devil posted:Capitalism is a woefully inefficient economic system for improving human lives. Though I will concede it is better than slavery and feudalism. Dude your typical farmer peasant in England during the middle ages had more free time to the point England started drafting specific laws later on to keep them working Also lol save the healthcare talk until after the GOP kills off its own fanbase after repealing Obamacare
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Jan 8, 2017 16:37
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Xae posted:Medicare doesn't negotiate prices. It sets procedure prices by a formula and it is legally forbidden from negotiating drug prices. And why exactly would it be impossible to remove the legal ban on negotiating prices or tweak said formula?
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Jan 8, 2017 16:49
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Before capitalism came along the poor weren't so wholly subservient to a the higher economic classes since subsistence was still a thing. Look at Alexander II's land reforms in Ukraine.
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Jan 8, 2017 17:12
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Cerebral Bore posted:And why exactly would it be impossible to remove the legal ban on negotiating prices or tweak said formula? Apparently the fact that Medicare is forbidden to negotiate is some axiomatic property of the program and not, you know providing health care to people regardless of their ability to pay for care
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Jan 8, 2017 17:18
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cheese posted:Can you really not loving comprehend that if every single American were covered under Medicare, that this would enable us to have significant leverage to negotiate lower rates for a wide variety of services, procedures and medications? Your argument is literally "Single payer would not matter because costs would be the same" when half of the loving point is that single payer gives you a strangle hold over costs. Costs are not fixed. They are not chiseled in the stone of the loving Lincoln Memorial. Chill out. I fully understand the concept of, "Being the only payer lets you negotiate". I'm pushing back against some earlier posts that said, "Let's just get to single payer and somehow the costs will work themselves out." The costs won't work themselves out unless we do something about it (which might start with something like, "Let Medicare negotiate prices aggressively."). I don't claim to have every answer, but I do know that ignoring cost is rarely a good policy in the long-term. I do feel (i.e. I don't have a lot of good data points on this, other than personal experience which is often a terrible basis for broad-based policy), that we aren't evaluating enough about why provider costs are skyrocketing. Is it greedy doctors? Is it medical liability insurance premiums? Is it government regulation on the type of medical devices permitted for certain surgeries? Is it the general health of the populace caused by saving more babies via NICUs? I would be surprised if costs are wholly driven upwards by one single thing, and we may make decisions as a society to simply deal with higher costs for certain things, but I see very few policy-makers doing more than wringing their hands at the issue of cost. Edit: Syntax. Ynglaur fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Jan 8, 2017 |
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Jan 8, 2017 17:49
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Orange Devil posted:Even if it's invested, private wealth always seeks a positive return, so it's only ever invested in things which are expected to be profitable in the relatively short term. The exception here is if a wealthy person takes a personal interest in either a branch of basic research or other long term scientific goal or trying to eradicate a disease or something of that nature. Even in those cases though, the bulk of that person's wealth still remains profit seeking, as a single person is literally unable to personally manage billions of dollars in any kind of effective way. No 'capitalist' country relies on capitalism entirely. Real life first world countries have 25-50% of the economy controlled by government and the rest regulated with healthcare and safety nets. So your last statement is pretty irrelevant (just like generalizations about government or taxes). And world poverty and climate change are examples of problems that run much deeper than economics. Helsing posted:Simple, intuitive and compelling narratives like "let's give everyone access to this highly popular and efficient program so that they don't have to go bankrupt or forgo medical treatment when they get sick" is, in my opinion, a better strategy for mobilizing voters. It's far fetched at the moment but I think one thing that leftists and liberals in the US have lacked in recent years is a longer-term agenda or guiding ideology that goes beyond technocratic tinkering. Having a broadly understood goal like expanding health insurance to the masses rather than trying to force people through economic sanctions into a fundamentally broken market for health insurance is the way to go. Maybe. As an aside the huge problem at the moment is that no one has faith in institutions of any kind including government. This is a fundamental problem for the left which equally argues that 'the system' is rigged. People are clearly buying that but government is part of 'the system' and being centralized is easier to demonize and fear. I think the center and left need to actively try to reconstruct faith in at least some institutions. Somehow. But I don't get the sense of this being the focus. For example I bet we're going to see more energy spent attacking Trump than defending the things he's trying to destroy. Still don't get why you think this is a worthwhile argument when healthcare is clearly local and it can't actually be globalized.
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Jan 8, 2017 18:00
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asdf32 posted:No 'capitalist' country relies on capitalism entirely. Real life first world countries have 25-50% of the economy controlled by government and the rest regulated with healthcare and safety nets. So your last statement is pretty irrelevant (just like generalizations about government or taxes). Uhuh, and who controls the government?
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Jan 8, 2017 19:12
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Ynglaur posted:Chill out. I fully understand the concept of, "Being the only payer lets you negotiate". I'm pushing back against some earlier posts that said, "Let's just get to single payer and somehow the costs will work themselves out." The costs won't work themselves out unless we do something about it (which might start with something like, "Let Medicare negotiate prices aggressively."). I don't claim to have every answer, but I do know that ignoring cost is rarely a good policy in the long-term. I'm also far less worried about "costs" in general and more by the fact that countless Americans suffer financial hardship as a result of medical costs, which an expanded Medicare program would absolutely address. As a nation, we have the money to pay for healthcare for all Americans and its important to keep in mind that when most people say "Healthcare costs are rising" what they mean are "for American families", not as some kind of sterile X dollars per procedure formula.
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Jan 8, 2017 19:13
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Orange Devil posted:Uhuh, and who controls the government? The voters mostly for better and worse it seems. And a perfect example of what I was talking about earlier. This person wants the government doing more but doesn't hesitate to tear it down. If government is so easily corrupted why would I want it controlling my healthcare?
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Jan 8, 2017 19:27
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asdf32 posted:The voters mostly for better and worse it seems. Because it's only indirectly controlled by corporate interests rather than outright. Also the government isn't so much easily corrupted as literally created by and for the capitalist class. That was the whole point of the liberal revolutions. In any case, the solution can not be to democratically (or otherwise for that matter) change the government to serve the interests of the people without also doing away with the capitalist economic system. Also when I talk about the capitalist system being terrible at improving the human condition and mention healthcare, why the gently caress is everyone else only talking about the US? People are dying of easily and cheaply treated diseases by the loving millions in other parts of the world you know. It's a massive indictment of capitalism. Orange Devil fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Jan 8, 2017 |
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Jan 8, 2017 19:42
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That moment when I feel like there are some Roman or Chinese Emperor's that would do a far better job at setting policies for an equitable distribution of the economic gains of the system than the US government over the last 30 years.
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Jan 8, 2017 20:00
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Orange Devil posted:Because it's only indirectly controlled by corporate interests rather than outright. Also the government isn't so much easily corrupted as literally created by and for the capitalist class. That was the whole point of the liberal revolutions. In any case, the solution can not be to democratically (or otherwise for that matter) change the government to serve the interests of the people without also doing away with the capitalist economic system. No the threats of capitalism just aren't that unique. Also as I recall people died in the world while soviet socialism existed too.
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Jan 8, 2017 20:07
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Ynglaur posted:Chill out. I fully understand the concept of, "Being the only payer lets you negotiate". I'm pushing back against some earlier posts that said, "Let's just get to single payer and somehow the costs will work themselves out." The costs won't work themselves out unless we do something about it (which might start with something like, "Let Medicare negotiate prices aggressively."). I don't claim to have every answer, but I do know that ignoring cost is rarely a good policy in the long-term. You're pretty obviously responding to my post -- or at least the straw man version of it -- where I argued that costs are far less of an issue than providing adequate care. What you're conveniently ignoring, since you didn't actually quote anything I said, is that in the same post I did agree costs are an issue that needs to be dealt with. I even suggested a theoretical interpretation of why costs are so high and outlined a couple policies that could hypothetically deal with rising costs. asdf32 posted:Maybe. As an aside the huge problem at the moment is that no one has faith in institutions of any kind including government. This is a fundamental problem for the left which equally argues that 'the system' is rigged. People are clearly buying that but government is part of 'the system' and being centralized is easier to demonize and fear. I think the center and left need to actively try to reconstruct faith in at least some institutions. Somehow. But I don't get the sense of this being the focus. For example I bet we're going to see more energy spent attacking Trump than defending the things he's trying to destroy. The "centre" isn't a coherent position, it's more of a rhetorical stance for defending the status quo, which is all but indefensible. And people didn't lose faith in the status quo because of a Russian mind virus or the meme magick of the internet. They lost faith because of repeated and highly visible failures. Domestic and foreign policy events that weren't supposed to happen have continued to happen year after year. There's absolutely no evidence, even after all these failures, that anyone within the "centre" actually recognizes or acknowledges their significant role in creating these situations. They are very much the problem and as long as they're allowed to keep running things they are going to continue screwing up and those screw ups are going to add fuel to the flames. I mean, what would your proposal actually look like in practice? I cannot imagine how "the left", whatever we want that to mean in this context, could do anything except discredit itself further by trying to restore people's "faith" in the status quo. If the establishment wants to restore faith they could take a page from the lessons of the 20th century. A strong political commitment to broadly shared prosperity, sharp limits on monopolies and oligopolies to prevent price gouging, ensuring an ample supply of good jobs and a strong distrust of finance and financial deregulation, those are some of the basic requirements for a system where people have faith in their government (notice I say they are necessary but not that they are sufficient, since other factors are required as well). There's zero evidence that the people benefiting from the status quo right now would ever tolerate those policies. quote:Still don't get why you think this is a worthwhile argument when healthcare is clearly local and it can't actually be globalized. What the hell are you talking about? It would not be difficult to either import medical experts or even to subsidize medical tourism and fly people out to approved clinics in other countries where care is less expensive. A throw away line about how "healthcare is local" is not a substitute for making an actual argument.
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Jan 8, 2017 20:23
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Orange Devil posted:Uhuh, and who controls the government? a literal real estate developer with literally the ceo of the worlds largest corporation in his top spot my fav thing about this last election is what a hack writer god is
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Jan 8, 2017 20:30
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StabbinHobo posted:a literal real estate developer with literally the ceo of the worlds largest corporation in his top spot He included some neat Easter eggs though. For instance, if we still reckoned time using the Republican calendar that was introduced at the height of the French Revolution (with everything reorganized on a decimal system with one hundred minutes in an hour and ten hours in a day and ten newly named months per year, etc.) then Trump's election occurred on the 18th of Brumaire, the same day that Napoleon Bonaparte first seized power in 1799.
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Jan 8, 2017 20:46
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Helsing posted:You're pretty obviously responding to my post -- or at least the straw man version of it -- where I argued that costs are far less of an issue than providing adequate care. What you're conveniently ignoring, since you didn't actually quote anything I said, is that in the same post I did agree costs are an issue that needs to be dealt with. I even suggested a theoretical interpretation of why costs are so high and outlined a couple policies that could hypothetically deal with rising costs. Fair enough. I was reading and responding quickly, and may have missed your other points.
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Jan 9, 2017 01:50
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Ynglaur posted:I do feel (i.e. I don't have a lot of good data points on this, other than personal experience which is often a terrible basis for broad-based policy), that we aren't evaluating enough about why provider costs are skyrocketing. Is it greedy doctors? Is it medical liability insurance premiums? Is it government regulation on the type of medical devices permitted for certain surgeries? Is it the general health of the populace caused by saving more babies via NICUs? I would be surprised if costs are wholly driven upwards by one single thing, and we may make decisions as a society to simply deal with higher costs for certain things, but I see very few policy-makers doing more than wringing their hands at the issue of cost. Given that we are the only first world nation with a fully private healthcare system, and that cost inflation is worse for us by orders of magnitude than anyone else with a comparable economy, can't we can make a rational case for causation here? Maybe it's just as simple as "Where healthcare can be driven by profit motive, it will be." Maybe not a whole lot more analysis really needs to be done, and maybe if we are able to nationalize the system and negotiate prices as a single buyer, the costs will necessarily go down, as they have for everyone else who has done this. edit: I'm actually shocked that you would even present neonatal infant care as a case for cost inflation when we have a worse infant mortality rate than loving Slovakia. Dr. Fishopolis fucked around with this message at 07:17 on Jan 9, 2017 |
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Jan 9, 2017 07:13
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