U.S. Politics

[AlioTheFool]

The essential problem is the failure to understand that global wealth is a finite resource. As such, when a greater amount is held by the small number of people at the top, by definition it has to be taken from those elsewhere. Greater poverty is the essential, inevitable and unavoidable consequence of the harbouring of wealth.

Hence, the need to forcibly redistribute said wealth.

I don't think everyone is entitled to an equal share of the pie. Some people truly work harder than others (ignoring the realities of social influences on success), so they earn a better share of the whole.

I just don't think anyone or any group consisting of 1% of the population earns a 90% share of the whole.

[mj2sexay]

Hence, the need to forcibly redistribute said wealth.

How about instead of appealing to muh guvment to rob people you just do it yourself?

Also, sad to see Kennedy retire. The very definition of a judicial moderate.

[ons]

How about instead of appealing to muh guvment to rob people you just do it yourself? 

Wait, are you a 'taxation is theft' ancap devotee?

[mj2sexay]

Wait, are you a 'taxation is theft' ancap devotee?

Absolutely not, but “forced wealth redistribution” is a nice way of saying, “let’s fuckin rob people for the high crime of being successful.”

[SixFeetDeep]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/post-politics/wp/2017/01/23/progressives-launch-justice-democrats-to-counter-primary-corporate-legislators/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.23123964345a&__twitter_impression=true

RIP Libs

[Badger]

smh

Actually she's right.

[Badger]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/post-politics/wp/2017/01/23/progressives-launch-justice-democrats-to-counter-primary-corporate-legislators/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.23123964345a&__twitter_impression=true

RIP Libs

Article is a year and a half old but JD has done a good job backing Dems who arent completely worthless.

[SixFeetDeep]

RIP Libs

https://nypost.com/2018/07/07/is-hillary-clinton-secretly-planning-to-run-in-2020/

[Johnny English]

https://nypost.com/2018/07/07/is-hillary-clinton-secretly-planning-to-run-in-2020/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines

[SixFeetDeep]

https://mobile.twitter.com/ocasio2018/status/1017394155268575232

[Badger]

https://mobile.twitter.com/ocasio2018/status/1017394155268575232

freak this guy.

Edit: Crowley says he's not running and can't remove his name from the ballot. So... freak this guy anyway.

[bojanglesman]

Moved

[SixFeetDeep]

https://mobile.twitter.com/dailycaller/status/1022852142682570752

1) tax
2) profit

[SixFeetDeep]

During a recent, wide-ranging interview with “The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah, Ocasio-Cortez said she is unlike any politician — and one that will not waver once inside the halls of Congress — because she found victory in a major primary without the support of major Wall Street corporations and private equity firms.

“I think that what makes our campaign and my candidacy a little different is that I have taken a public pledge not to accept any corporate PAC money whatsoever,” Ocasio-Cortez said to applause.

“I actually think I may be one of the only ones that actually got elected for the first time on that,” she added. “Many folks got elected with some corporate money and then they swore it off after. But I think I’m one of the first to get elected right out of the gate without any corporate PAC money, which gives me a very large degree of independence.”

Later in the interview, Ocasio-Cortez said “it comes back to money in politics” and who is “financing your campaign.” She denounced private equity firms who finance political campaigns alleging it’s “no coincidence they profit off of low wages.”

But what’s the truth?

According to campaign finance documents, Ocasio-Cortez raised $861,698.54 during her successful bid to unseat Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.) for New York’s 14th congressional district.

However, there’s just one glaring problem that doesn’t align with what Ocasio-Cortez told Noah.

The disclosures show that Ocasio-Cortez received $3,399 JP Morgan Chase, a major Wall Street corporate bank, and $2,700 from Elevation Partners, a New York-based private equity firm with nearly $2 billion in assets.

While the JP Morgan Chase donations came from two company employees, the Elevation Parters’ donation came via Roger McNamee, a founding parter at the firm.

lol

[SixFeetDeep]

Proponents of single-payer healthcare in the United States point out that the idea isn’t new here: President Harry Truman briefly made a compulsory national health program a plank of his Fair Deal, before withdrawing it amid robust bipartisan opposition.

But there’s another, even more important sense in which “Medicare for All” isn’t new: several states have tried to go down that path. All of them stopped once the full cost and necessary tax hikes became clear.

According to new analysis from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, the “Medicare for All” plan championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., would increase government healthcare spending by $32.6 trillion over ten years. Even doubling current individual and corporate income tax revenues would prove insufficient to fund such a program.

Several states ran into similar problems. With growing interest at the federal level, the pitfalls states encountered are now especially instructive.

Sanders, one of the most vocal supporters of single-payer healthcare on Capitol Hill, had a front-row seat for the demise of a similar plan in one of the wealthiest and most progressive states in the nation. In 2011, Vermont came closer to implementing a single-payer system than any other state. The legislature passed the bill. Gov. Peter Shumlin, D-Vt., who had campaigned on the idea, happily signed Green Mountain Care into law.

Then the invoice arrived.

Vermont made the mistake of adopting an extraordinarily costly overhaul of the entire healthcare system without waiting for a fiscal estimate or establishing exactly how the state would pay for it. When the estimates came in, they were stratospheric. In a wealthy state with the second-lowest uninsured rate in the country (3.7 percent, compared to a national average of 8.8 percent), the state’s own estimates concluded that single-payer would require a near-doubling of the state’s budget.

Vermont hoped to use federal funding for half of this cost, but to cover its share, taxes would have to go up — a lot. Payroll taxes would have had to rise by 11.5 percentage points. Individual income tax rates could go up by as much as 9 percentage points. Shumlin scrapped the plan, concluding that it would be “unwise and untenable.”

Voters in Colorado arrived at much the same conclusion when single-payer healthcare went on the ballot in 2016. The price tag (which was arguably low-balled) was enough to tax income at rates as high as 14.63 percent, more than triple the state’s current flat income tax rate.

The electorate balked at the costs. They may have been concerned about the details, too, as it vested authority to adjust benefits and even change tax rates with a board of largely unaccountable trustees. No one operates under the illusion that private insurance is a panacea in this regard, but at least people have options and avenues of appeal. Single-payer strips that away; the government provides what it chooses to provide. In Colorado, that proved a potent concern.

On Election Day, the constitutional amendment establishing ColoradoCare met a crushing defeat, rejected by an astonishing 79 percent of voters.

Finally, consider the case of California, a state with a Democratic governor, Democratic supermajorities in both legislative chambers, and an electorate predisposed to embrace the “Medicare for All” concept. In 2017, single-payer legislation dubbed Healthy California passed the Senate, but was then pulled by House leadership, with the speaker expressing concern that the proposal was too expensive, lacked appropriate funding mechanisms, and wasn’t ready for prime time.

He was right about how expensive it was. The state’s estimates pegged the cost at $400 billion per year, twice the state’s budget. An outside report commissioned by an advocacy group rejected the estimates of the nonpartisan legislative office, concluding that the plan would cost a mere $331 billion.

California’s current budget is $201 billion.

If states are the laboratories of democracy, single-payer still hasn’t made it out of the test tube. And these states had an advantage that the federal government doesn’t, as they believed they could offload about half of their costs on the federal government. At the federal level, there’s nowhere to go — except to the taxpayers.

If wealthy, progressive states like Vermont and California found the costs intolerable, and if voters in the swing state of Colorado defeated universal health care by a 4-to-1 vote, their experiences do not bode well for a national program. Sooner or later, the enticing language of “Medicare for All” runs up against some very real and very daunting costs.