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Honestly, I think they just want us to go ahead and die already. I've actually seen articles to that effect.
These numbers sound roughly correct. We can roughly assume people use Medicare on the ave from age 65 to 85 and most of money paid in comes from people ages 25 to 65. The same group of people would be paying in but now also paying for ages 0 to 65. That's 65/(85-65) = 3.25 * what the program costs now. There are some savings b/c young people are healthier, but there will be some increased costs b/c Medicare payouts are lower than ave prices. Providers might have to raise prices if they lose some of these higher-paying customers.
Indirect costs:
- The costs of individual are socialized, so society has a legitimate reason to want to force me to abandon my unhealthful bad habits.
- Politicians will spend time debating things like how many mamograms or colonoscopies gov't should pay for.
- Gov't in the future might be run by attention-seeking clowns like President Trump. How many people want a critically important service they buy like healthcare run by anything associated with people like that?
It doesn't matter who you and I think would be good at managing your healthcare or using government surveillance without a warrant responsibly. You never know who will get that power.
My short-term (may become long-term) concern is that most politicians treat jobs and wealth as a scarce resource to be rationed rather than the result of smart people working hard to help one another in exchange for money. My long-term concern is the increased return on equity from automation will be seen as "the rich always get richer and the poor get poor, unless we have socialism."
1). What really matters is how my life is going, and not how rich someone else is. Inequality is not important
2) it’s not like automation and robots is anything new at all. Elevators are robots, so are traffic lights and computers. But we all benefit from those things and the reduced costs and improved life they offer
3) inflation is a big culprit preventing us from seeing the reduced costs of automation in dollars. Keeps us from appreciating automation
4) world trade has exposed us to people willing to work for less. We in the USA have not competed well in this environment, resulting in the loss of jobs to Chinese workers
5) Obama deficit spent trillions in his 8 years which resulted in pent up inflation hidden by the federal reserve. Businesses are trying to limit price rises by cutting employment wherever possible, all the time while government is fighting the inflation it caused by raising minimum wages.
6). Deficit spending and inflation has taken away our ability to use prices to understand what’s really going on in the economy. I think dollar inflation has really run between 5 and 10% per year since about 1970. If so, anything that hasn’t rises in price by a factor of at least 10-15 is now actually cheaper in real terms due to efficiency improvements
7) robots are used only when they are cheaper per hour than people when all the costs are taken into account, and when all the advantages of each are considered
8). If inflation were zero, people would need to make less money to live today because of the robots and automation
#2 - I agree with this, but I think we may in the middle of a revolution as big as the beginning of agriculture or the industrial revolution, possibly something more than just more automation. Or maybe this is just a continuation of the industrial revolution. Regardless, socialism is not the answer.
#s 3, 6, and 8) - I never got why inflation matters. It's a simple matter to calculate for inflation when comparing past prices. If after adjusting for inflation whatever you sell is worth less, that's just the fact. It's not like it would suddenly be worth more if the medium of exchange were different.
It's a simple matter to store wealth in instruments that hold stable value (i.e. that "go up with inflation"), way more stable than a single asset like land, gold, or oil. I do not understand how money depreciating in value in a slow, predictable way causes anyone that much difficulty.
4) I see this as a lot like #2. Once travel became fast and inexpensive, there's no reason to think willing buyers and sellers can be kept apart on account of geography.
5) Deficit spending is a huge looming problem, but it did not cause inflation. There is no reason to single out President Obama. The deficit spending began during the president before him and nearly tripled when the next president came in.
I see successful businesses as trying to find a way to offer value that allows them to raise prices. A business model based just on low prices is questionable.
Minimum wages causes surplus supply of labor, i.e. unemployment. All my life the min wage has been near the price for unskilled labor, so it really hasn't had that much effect. If they raise it higher than the cost of labor, I believe it will not cause inflation but will cause other problems.
7) Yes. What a misguided sense of charity to have people working jobs that aren't necessary out of pity. I actually don't think that will happen. I do think people will use it as a justification for socialism.
We are about to see robots "learn" what they need to do. This will be a big thing.
The real problem with inflation is that it distorts the usefullness of pricing that most people instinctively rely on. I dont really know what the real inrlaion numbers are at any given point in time, given that the government lies so much, so I dont know if real prices have risen or fallen.
As to china, given we dont have the gold standard, we ship printed dollars over to china and then they are going to spend them back here, and we will see inflation kicking in. They arent going to just sit over there and see the US$ they are holding just losing value.
They just have to get around to telling you which looter scheme they are going to use.
The Australian constitution requires a balanced budget, so deficit spending isn't allowed. The Labor government had to choose between placing overnight restrictions on medical service, or instituting crippling tax increases. They chose neither, and went to Swiss bankers, trying to use that country's extreme privacy measures to sneak by the deficit spending law. They got caught and the Governor General had to disband the government and set up new elections, which the Liberal party (more like our GOP) won.
We, unfortunately, have neither restrictions on deficit spending nor a Governor General (a unique element of British Commonwealth countries, who has only one duty: to report to the Royal head of state when a country's leadership has committed "grievous offenses" and evict the offending government). The result being, if idiot voters buy into this idea, either multi-trillion dollar deficit spending or huge tax increases. The government budget would have to double immediately (and I personally think this is a low estimate).
I honestly believe based on recent massive political shifts since 2016, the majority of voting Americans, in particular enough intelligent and influential younger ones, will never fall for any universal/one-payer health care system again.
All my many leftist friends and mostly left-wing cousins will. But there just aren't near enough of those to swing this country any further in the Far Left direction...
Yes. Nutty people and politics are dangerous.
I think she has purposely left one letter off her middle name.
I suppose it is an Indian name: her mother was from India. Her father from Jamaica.
So she is not exactly black as she prefers to paint (no pun intended) herself.
Ethnicity is considered a winning card for the left, just ask Warren. As long as it is not white.