Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/01/05/limits-to-idiocracy.html
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“there are areas where wrong people are intractably wrong, and others, like healthcare and taxation”
One of the biggest problems, IMHO, is that almost everyone who talks about health insurance conflates the problem with health care. Even the Affordable Care Act is a misnomer - it has nothing to do with “care” and everything to do with “insurance”.
There are many reasons why health care is ridiculously expensive in the USA as compared to other advanced economies, and it has little to do with insurance. Rather it has to do with cartels, the rise of administration over caregivers, and the protection of those cartels by laws passed by congress.
Until health care is fixed, and until we stop conflating the two ideas, health insurance is going o be widely misunderstood by the populace, regardless of the political team that they choose to side with.
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The Trump supporters I know have frustratingly taken the position that they are happy about the tax plan benefitting the super-rich. Their logic is that the rich pay the lion’s share of taxes and so deserve the biggest tax-break.
It’s pretty frustrating and I’m running out of ways to try and engage them.
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Good luck with that. Maybe casually slide in that the really rich already pay very little income tax because they earn money through investments, which are taxed at a lower rate. This tax bill reduces that already small tax liability to zero or less in some cases (ie - they’ll get money back from the government while not having owed any taxes to begin with - welfare for people who have more money than a combined 50%+ of the population).
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Which suggests that, despite fake news and the imperviousness of Trumpists to reality checks about Benghazi and Pizzagate, “most Americans share a fact-based view of reality.”
Perhaps, but a lot of them also share serious delusions about their place in the context of that reality. There are the temporarily embarrassed millionaires, the believers in the Invisible Bearded Sky Man™ and his out-of-wedlock kid, the white supremacists, the ultra-nationalist militia “patriots”, etc. It totals up to about 30% of the electorate who think things will work out just fine despite knowing that this regime is not working on their behalf when it comes to economic policy. It emerges out of ignorance more than anything else. For example…
I’d give up. Some people are just not intellectually or educationally equipped to grasp the concept of a progressive tax system, and there’s no point in banging your head against that wall.
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It’s difficult to engage stupid.
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I searched diligently my entire office, and found zero fu$ks for any tRump & TGOP supporters.
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You get an E for effort. Now have a nice cold one on me!
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I think that people who are surprised by this are those who reflexively divide the country into two along one axis. It is a simplification that conceals and confuses as much as it reveals. There are many, many different issues, and while there is some tendency for opinions of them to be clustered, you can’t simply say that people on the right believe a, b, and C while people on the left believe x, y, and z.
Make no mistake, politicians play into that sort of division, because people are often more motivated by what they dislike than what they like, and a simplistic division like this makes it easier to appeal to a bare majority of voters.
Someone should remind those supporters that many of the uber-rich (via ‘donations’) paid for the tax-breaks.
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I dunno. I expect that, when Trump’s mooks see their first paycheck with a couple extra Washington’s in it, they’ll forget that all expires in 10 years and get back on board the clown car to nowhere.
It’s a win-win as by then there will be Dems controlling shit to take the blame.
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That stopped clocks show the correct time twice a day is not evidence that stopped clocks always live in a fact-based reality. Or something.
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That object behind the elephant in the picture. Is it a political movement?
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I’m not an expert on health economics, far from it, but my understanding of why the US is such an outlier in terms of spending and outcomes is that it is in fact because of insurance. Put simply when the body deciding cost has an incentive to greater profit rather than lower cost and better outcomes across income bands you tend to get a concentration on making the rich live longer at ever greater cost with inefficient rent extraction from the poor.
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So knowing that the tax law recently passed is a scam, Donald’s reporters will do what in response?
One thing you can bet they won’t do is to vote the GOP out of power. Which is why I hate these kinds of stories. They’ve been voting against their self interests (and the nation’s good) for decades now and generations. Clearly, they’re not going to change.
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Yes, the inevitable result of bowel cognition, or going with your gut, if you don’t have enough moral fiber in your intellectual diet.
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Rent extraction by the insurance parasites is a major part of it, but not all of it. Every part of the for-profit US health sector has its snout in the trough.
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