I have personal experience here. I’ve managed to survive 4 cancers, one has left me disabled. I was fortunate to always have insurance coverage, very thankful. I can not imagine why anyone refuses to get coverage now that is available for everyone… At this stage people have to make a choice to not be covered…
I have not yet decided.
It is possible to have too little income to qualify for Obamacare, but too much income to qualify for Medicaid.
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The sad thing is there actually is a way to do this. A leading cause of divorce, probably the leading cause, is financial stress. So this is cyclical, in that if you want fewer broken homes the best approach would be to reduce economic inequality. And we know ways to do that which have been proven to work throughout the first world.
Except no, people like Gerard reject those out of hand. They keep repeating that democratic socialism has been a disaster or too costly to keep up, and that extreme capitalism has been doing better, as if the US was Sweden and Sweden was the USSR. And so we are left trying to figure out a way forward while avoiding the known path.
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Oh good. Because if you look at child poverty tables, the countries with the least are Democratic Socialist, while we are down with Latvia and Bulgaria:
Incidentally, the divorce rate in the US is 49%, the divorce rate in Finland is 56%, and in Norway it is 43%, so I think it is clear that a nation’s economic model and existence of a social safety net, not broken families, is the major factor in child poverty.
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I think anyone is qualified for Obamacare, but some may choose to not buy it.
Then please read this:
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When using US numbers for poverty they do not count as median income
Benefits from poverty programs in place like Medicaid, food stamps, Earned income tax credit etc. Median income only includes what is reported.
Also, I think it erroneous to expect the US to match up to very small countries that fund their welfare programs on Petro dollars. Let alone that they are tiny countries with a generally homogeneous population. We have 350mm people living in very diverse
Environments, from city to the fields of places like Mississippi or Louisiana, made up of a wide variety of people from different back grounds and ethnicity. Not the same situation as Norway.
I will say this, 75% of people with a poverty level income have TVs, cable, automobiles, and have adequate food. One other big item not included in our poverty numbers is the underground economy, which is at least 2trillion dollars. How many of the people classified as poor, make money but do not report it ? I am not saying we need not worry about the poor, but there is a load of trouble counting them.
The divorce trend in the US is a 50 year trend. People had financial distress in 1930 but they did not divorce like we do now. This trend matches the general sad turn away from marriage. And its tragic for children.
I am confused about how “billionaires” should be counted. Is it assets or income. Most Billionaires have everything tied up in companies they pioneered.
Are you saying Bill Gates should send all his money to Bernie if he wins?
He would crash Microsofts stock and cause a disaster for many labor unions, public employees, retires and more. Does not make sense!
Not just Norway; this thread has also mentioned Australia, Canada, Denmark, England, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, and Sweden, and there are others, all of which have had success with democratic socialist policies to more or less the extent they have tried. They also, incidentally, tend to show that such policies have positive returns on investment – things like public health care don’t bankrupt governments, they make them money through having a functional society to tax.
And really, despite special pleading like the US being almost as populous and diverse as Europe, those are the sorts of policies that have been most successful there when tried. All the evidence shows that’s just the best approach to running a country with a high standard of living. So excuses for exceptionalism and thought-terminating cliches like socialism works great until you run out of other people’s money are just that, excuses without anything to back them up.
If things like reducing poverty are important to you, there is a lot that works well for you to consider. If that’s less important than to maintain the pure fiction that the US and extreme capitalism have been the best…well, then Sanders is probably not the one for you, but it’s really heartbreaking to see that as a priority over the lives of other people.
That’s funny! You’re the one who talked about there being only 540 billionaires in the US, and now you’re not sure how to count them? It’s almost as if you don’t believe in your own statements, you’re just doing a Gish gallop where you throw out chaff to get out of having to defend them. Sorry, but such disingenuity does not play well here.
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Do you really think it’s more likely that marriages were happier in the 30s, or that women stayed in relationships they’d prefer to leave because of the overwhelming financial & social cost of being divorced?
And what does marriage have to do with Bernie Sanders anyway? Is anyone running on an anti-marriage ticket? (I guess you could argue that the Republicans would like to make a lot of people’s marriages illegal…)
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Increasing rates of divorce seem to be one of Gerard’s rather flailing efforts to say something meaningful while keeping his eyes and ears shut to sensible counterguments. Like this one:[quote=“chenille, post:1476, topic:59394”]
Not just Norway; this thread has also mentioned Australia, Canada, Denmark, England, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, and Sweden, and there are others, all of which have had success with democratic socialist policies to more or less the extent they have tried. They also, incidentally, tend to show that such policies have positive returns on investment – things like public health care don’t bankrupt governments, they make them money through having a functional society to tax.
[/quote]
I’ve met a lot of people like Gerard, and those are the kind of factual complexities about better ways to run a society that just go right through them. Or maybe over them – I wouldn’t say Gerard seems incapable of understanding how the views he’s been spouting here are simplistic nonsense. He’s just so clearly, thoroughly interpollated with plutocrat-serving ideology that factual complexities simply don’t compute for him.
Demonstrations that other ways of running a society work better Must. Be. DENIED.
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Keep in mind that Europe is not doing well in competing for world markets. Unemployment averages over 10%, while in the US it is less then 5%.
Enonomic growth paints an even gloomier picture, there is none. The issue is that these welfare state models are not sustainable, and it just gets worse from here. The US has adopted many welfare state policies as well, just not as many. But our real economic competitors are China, South Korea, and other Asian countries that are mean and lean. If we continue to loose market share things will get worse for us too with fewer jobs, lower paying jobs, fewer benefits. We must continue to work towards better productivity, lower cost in order to stay economically vibrant. Wishing it weren’t so will not help, We even need to continue to develop Fracking and reducing energy costs. This is not Bernie’s path and if he wins he will bring our standard of living down.
I literally just yelled at my screen, “But they owe you NOTHING!”
By all means, let’s give people with the least accountability to the public the greatest influence over their lives.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to find a startled cat.
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…This is about Bernie Sanders: if you want to talk about Socialism, go here.
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So Gerard, do you also believe that the experience of all these countries does not apply to the US because our name starts with a “U” and theirs doesn’t?
So, for which of our enemies are you an agent provocateur?
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My heart goes out to you here, cancer tears things apart like almost nothing else and the fact you have survived it 4 times is… indescribably impressive and an incomprehensibly amazing feat. However I would point out that a large amount of taxpayer money currently goes towards medical research grants specifically to find better treatments for cancer and maybe even someday a cure. I wish we focused more money towards medical care and research and less towards defense but currently our countries/governments priorities seem to be mixed up but I do believe that Bernie Sanders is the candidate who can do the most out of the current group in fixing those priorities.
I also think it’s important to note that government environmental regulations (when they exist and are enforced with taxpayer money) can help prevent millions of future cancer cases by stopping large corporations and even small businesses from spewing carcinogens into the environment. Have you thought about that?
I think I want to address this separately. Private insurance is not even close to the equivalent public healthcare in a country with universal healthcare, my co-pays on say… an optometrist appointment have been over a thousand dollars before. If I was making only around 2000 a month and needed to drive to work and couldn’t do that without glasses what could I do? I would have to choose between spending over half of my income on a health necessity (even with insurance) and would have to sacrifice something else like my rent, or food, or insuran… oh right, couldn’t do that or the total would be around 3,000 dollars. I would be stuck.
In a country with universal healthcare, while maybe I would have to pay an extra 100 dollars a month in taxes (probably not that much if my income was 2,000 a month), I would no longer be paying for insurance and that optometrists appointment and glasses would have been free at the door.
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This is Reagan-era propaganda, from a time when mass media only went one direction and people would believe any stupid thing if somebody important and respectable said it on television.
Like, inequality is because divorce?
Dude, yo, grownups are talking in here.
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You created this topic so that means you are watching it by default. The assumption is that people who start topics are extremely interested in all replies, thus the default of watch for topics you have created.
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