The fact that the GOP never discusses any of those methods, and instead only talks about selling across state lines and mLpractice reform tells me they have little interest in doing anything productive about health delivery.
Pot. Meet Kettle.
I'm not well informed of all these variations because neither side brings them up, but it might be pure ignorance.
What are you’re thoughts on Kansas’ economic performance these last few years?
If memory serves Kansas cut their taxes (but not their spending) and just hoped the money would grow on trees. I've no idea what they did with regulations, probably nothing since states mostly implement federal policy rather than set it.
This isn't even equiv to trying to fix the federal tax code by going flat all at once as opposed to spaced out over years (Poland just freed the economy and knew it was going to be brutal and also knew quick and brutal was what they wanted).
All tax cuts don't pay for themselves, but that doesn't change that the gov is doing far too much which it does poorly.
Is it a riot when you use violence to prevent votes from being counted? Because it isn’t liberals who do that.
How many left wing riots have happened in the last year? Dozens? Are we into Hundreds?
And your reply is to mention one 16 year old right wing riot in the context of counting-dem-votes-extra-special-to-swing (i.e. steal) the election?
That you have to reach that far back and cherry pick that hard kind of proves my point. The bulk of the violence and threat of violence comes from the Left. It's just that the Left wants to pretend the Right is violent to scare people at the ballot box.
But a sustainable real per-capita growth rate of 5% per annum is fantasy, nothing short of the Singularity is likely to produce results of that magnitude.
10 year moving average of annual growth for the US (i.e. the move advanced economy)
http://ablog.typepad.com/.a/6a00e554717cc988330147e220e3f9970b-pi
20 year moving average of annual growth.
http://ablog.typepad.com/.a/6a00e554717cc988330147e1676b38970b-pi
The 50's and 60's weren't bare of growth stifling gov policies either, so we could have done better then. Even if we want to claim the 50's didn't do anything which suppressed growth (which would be an amazing claim), at worse I have to admit you're right about sustained 5%, and just move the goal posts to 4%.
My core point remains that our growth rate sucks, it's led to Trump-in-charge, and we're doing things which stifle growth so maybe we should stop.
1) Whatever the hell that means. In my book, the *second he takes office* while still holding ownership in hotels in foreign companies that foreign nationals and governments can bribe him with, and we have *literally no way to determine if that happened*, he should be impeached...
You don’t get to be president if we can’t see your financials and thus can’t know you aren’t being handed large chunks of money by random people. Period, end of story. You get elected, you don’t show your financials(2), you get impeached.
...Trump literally cannot operate as president. He has so many agreements and personal loans and licensing that…he can’t be president.
This would mean so much more if you were willing to apply this standard to HRC.
You and I had a discussion where I pointed out that some of HRC's fiscal moves were akin to winning the lottery multiple times, occurred in a corrupt office (as in 'found guilty') with people who stood to benefit if she gained money, and her most amazing wins occurred in the same period of time when their most corrupt dealings were happening... and you told me flat out that she must have just been lucky.
If that's the standard of proof we need to apply to HRC, then we also need to apply it to Trump.
Similarly if you're fine with Obama having an imperial presidency, then you should also be fine with Trump's.
While we're on this subject, has Trump-as-President changed your mind on the odds of a real bastard being in charge over the next 500 years?
As for the others, their growth rates are consistently low enough that we have this impression that it's natural for an "advanced" (i.e. socialistic) economy. There are serious costs to socialism (aka "command and control"), the biggest is running out of other people's money.
What they all share in common is they are a lot cheaper and employ a lot fewer bureaucrats than the American one.
Agreed. What we have is akin to home insurance which covers every change of lightbulb.
You do need the “death panels” if you want to call them that. But lets be honest, what you are talking about is present in some form in every insurance system. No system gives you unlimited access to care with no regard to resources, that moral event horizon has already been crossed.
Agreed. IMHO Congress is poorly equipped to deal with this issue, but the math of it is that half of your lifetime useage of medical care is in the last year or two of life.
America employs an absurdly huge amount of medical finance bureaucrats compared to other industrial economies. If you’re looking for a free lunch in freeing up resources that’s a lot more promising area to look than tax bureaucracy. Unlike with the tax thing, with the medical thing you have real examples of how it works in comparable societies
If you're talking about "single payer", I think it's inaccurate to think costs would go down with that in the US. That we've always flinched away from how much it'd cost indicates the opposite.
I wouldn't call it a free lunch, but if we want serious public financing of all things medical, what we need is something akin to death panels and/or other ways to keep the costs in line.
Yeah, but your religious belief aside, no fiddling with the tax code, even outright repeal, is gonna allow 5% growth. That’s magic pony economics
I think getting a 3% boost from just dealing with the tax code is extremely aggressive and probably unrealistic. Certainly the politics of it would prevent us from anything like a "single page", and the truly massive distortions have lots of support (mortgage interest for example).
I also think having a discussion about growth is useful, and a big part of that discussion should be what is the gov doing wrong and how much does it cost. Growth should be a big part of any talk about the government, and any gov program or rule.
On the "cost" side it's worth pointing out these massive social programs the left favours can't be paid for long term without growth, and a lack of growth leads to social upheaval (including both Trump's and Occupy Wall Street).
Your stealing a base assuming a continent size economy is free to do the same thing.
Only in part. Mostly I'm pointing out that we're doing things which are damaging growth, and suggesting that we try stopping those things before we declare that growth is impossible.
He had to have his phone taken away from him to keep him off Twitter.
You're comparing Twitter posting to nuclear wars? Rather than social media, do you have him swinging punches? Supposedly he's violently out of control on a regular basis, right?
he’s kept his finances strangely hidden
Strangely? Going public with them was really bad for Romney.
and all we DO know is that he’s been blackballed from US banks for his habit of defaulting on loans, right?
Trump plays pretty rough fiscally, and clearly uses the rules to his own benefit. However this issue is whether that's a bad thing.
And you hilariously think he’s made money.
I think he lies about being worth 10 Billion. Forbes thinks he's only worth 4 Billion.
All this is based on an article of faith: That government is massively holding back growth, and getting rid of government will increase growth.
We have 800,000 people whose jobs are to help others fill out tax forms. If we includes businesses we'd be above a million. Are you seriously claiming this adds value to the economy?
Or that an inhumanly complex tax code doesn't cause economic distortions and unintended consequences? Or that really large bureaucracies don't increase overhead, which in turn are passed to consumers?
So to end an old policy, you need to adopt a new one that allows for an adjustment period.
Agreed.
But the core of the issue is that the parties like conducting policy via the tax code. It’s a convenient way to provide a benefit to a favored group.
The entire "Trump" protest is, imho, something which would never have happened if we had a decent level of growth.
Put differently, if Obama had done a decent job on the economy, Hillary would have won with a "4 more years" slogan. All of these policies and short term trade offs which put growth last have long term consequences.
Those problematic personality traits? They existed before the campaign. They existed and were documented decades ago, when he was just a bad real estate developer.
You're suggesting that he's so unstable he could start a nuclear war on a whim.
This is the same guy who marries gold-diggers and manages to keep his money, manages to increase his money, and manages to raise really functional children who turn into functional adults. His personality flaws always seem to increase the public eye on him and seem... not so much calculated as cultivated to work to his advantage. He's been doing this for 50 years, if he were actually unstable he'd have melted down long before now...
...and he personally would lose hundreds of millions (or Billions) of dollars in a nuclear war which probably guaranties our safety right there.
Every one of which carefully evaluated and polled for maximum impact and minimum offence. And none of which she believed because there was this vast difference between what she said in public and what she said in private. She's for whatever is popular at the moment and against whatever is unpopular at the moment. You can add that to her list of negatives.
Pence is highly unlikely to pull out of NATO, invade Syria, nuke Libya, or otherwise do ‘dangerous’ things. We also don’t have to worry about him sexually assaulting Merkel, starting up a star chamber to investigate his political opponents, etc
This is like saying William Shatner liked beating people up just because Captain Kirk did.
At the moment Trump is a blank slate. What we know of him is a straw-man created by his public act and the insults of his political foes.
Think of him as Obama, 8 years ago, except Trump has a track record of private sector success.
Hopefully you don't get to be a multi-billionaire without some level of sanity; And the reports from the people who know him personally support the idea that it is an manipulative act (which admittedly he's really comfortable with).
I’m arguing that it was reasonable to think in advance that she was the best choice.
She's got no message other than "it's my turn."
She's very old and not charismatic.
Despite having far more money and support, she lost to an unknown 8 years ago.
She's been openly mixing her personal and public business since then to the point where she's got more than 150 million dollars.
She carries all the baggage of the various ethical scandals from previous decades.
I'm excluding fixing the primary election again Bernie and the email server because these things weren't known two years ago, but it was really well known this was the sort of thing she ran around doing as a matter of habit.
I don't know if Sanders could have won, but Biden could have just because he wasn't Trump and didn't have anywhere near the baggage and ethics issues Clinton did.
Does anyone know if Biden is charismatic? I've never heard him give a speech.
But lets not over-estimate how simple it would be to apply simple solutions to real world problems.
Simplicity is much harder to game than complexity.
The current tax code is deliberately made complex because of Congress having been captured by layer after layer of special interests, and because of Congress trying to use the tax code to micromanage the economy and pick winners and losers, and because Congress uses the tax code as a stick/carrot to drum up campaign contributions.
Then after Congress gets done with that the rules are handed over to a bureaucracy which uses their "interpretation" of these rules to empire build, and large complex companies often defensively build their own bureaucracies (which also empire build) to deal with the gov's.
So how much of a growth hit do we take because of this mess? 1%? 2%? If it's 3% then a full fix takes us to 5% growth right there... however we'd be asking Congress to give up a lot of power, fund extorting ability, and face down a lot of upset people.
Millions of people lose their jobs. Without it's tax breaks, green energy probably dies. Lots of people (myself included) have too much house if their mortgage isn't tax deductible.
And that all that would be worth it for 5% growth.
Sanders might have won Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania by razor thin margins.
Sanders would have convinced me to vote for Trump rather than Johnson. One of the hallmarks of socialism is food shortages. That makes my involvement personal and is a big enough threat that Trump easily becomes the lesser evil.
Also Sanders never had bricks thrown at him. The DNC and RNC both went really light on him, if he'd been the actual nominee the gloves would have come off.
start trying to figure out how to bait Trump into really goddamn stupid moves. He *already* doesn’t trust a lot of the Republican establishment, and he is perfectly willing to totally destroy his relationship with Congress because he is a tiny-handed baby-man.
Impeach him and Pence is in charge. Pence is a solid conservative, Trump is a Rino.
I don't understand why Pence would be an improvement from your point of view.
Let’s be real here: so-called “BLM” riots occur after unarmed black folks are shot dead by cops. Which doesn’t strike me as either a conservative or liberal, but rather just a bunch of folks who are tired of being mistreated by cops and the criminal justice system.
Ferguson, the father of 'hands up don't shoot', was burned because of a lie. The "unarmed" criminal attacked a cop, tried to take his gun, and then continued.
Don Zeko:
Does anyone think sustained 5% growth is any more plausible than bringing the factories back?
How much economic distortion do we get from the tax code? How much from regulatory capture, how much could we gain from more free trade, immigration, from a fully functional educational system, etc?
I think 5% is possible on paper, I also think it'd take multiple massive political upheavals to get to it.
For example, going to a flat tax (or something describable on one page of paper) would mean most every tax attorney/accountant is out of work. Company bureaucracies would shrink, and the overhead associated with this would fall, although fundamentally we'd be shifting unproductive resources to productive resources, we'd be digesting the economic disruption for years.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Jack Move II”
Pot. Meet Kettle.
I'm not well informed of all these variations because neither side brings them up, but it might be pure ignorance.
"
If memory serves Kansas cut their taxes (but not their spending) and just hoped the money would grow on trees. I've no idea what they did with regulations, probably nothing since states mostly implement federal policy rather than set it.
This isn't even equiv to trying to fix the federal tax code by going flat all at once as opposed to spaced out over years (Poland just freed the economy and knew it was going to be brutal and also knew quick and brutal was what they wanted).
All tax cuts don't pay for themselves, but that doesn't change that the gov is doing far too much which it does poorly.
On “The Scorecard”
Violence.
"
How many left wing riots have happened in the last year? Dozens? Are we into Hundreds?
And your reply is to mention one 16 year old right wing riot in the context of counting-dem-votes-extra-special-to-swing (i.e. steal) the election?
That you have to reach that far back and cherry pick that hard kind of proves my point. The bulk of the violence and threat of violence comes from the Left. It's just that the Left wants to pretend the Right is violent to scare people at the ballot box.
"
:Sigh:, Yes, agreed. If he's really good it will be legal, if not then illegal.
May be we'll be real lucky and he'll botch it bad enough that we'll get some good government laws out of this.
On “Jack Move II”
10 year moving average of annual growth for the US (i.e. the move advanced economy)
http://ablog.typepad.com/.a/6a00e554717cc988330147e220e3f9970b-pi
20 year moving average of annual growth.
http://ablog.typepad.com/.a/6a00e554717cc988330147e1676b38970b-pi
The 50's and 60's weren't bare of growth stifling gov policies either, so we could have done better then. Even if we want to claim the 50's didn't do anything which suppressed growth (which would be an amazing claim), at worse I have to admit you're right about sustained 5%, and just move the goal posts to 4%.
My core point remains that our growth rate sucks, it's led to Trump-in-charge, and we're doing things which stifle growth so maybe we should stop.
On “The Scorecard”
@Davidtc
This would mean so much more if you were willing to apply this standard to HRC.
You and I had a discussion where I pointed out that some of HRC's fiscal moves were akin to winning the lottery multiple times, occurred in a corrupt office (as in 'found guilty') with people who stood to benefit if she gained money, and her most amazing wins occurred in the same period of time when their most corrupt dealings were happening... and you told me flat out that she must have just been lucky.
If that's the standard of proof we need to apply to HRC, then we also need to apply it to Trump.
Similarly if you're fine with Obama having an imperial presidency, then you should also be fine with Trump's.
While we're on this subject, has Trump-as-President changed your mind on the odds of a real bastard being in charge over the next 500 years?
On “Stephen Bush: Would Bernie Sanders have done better against Donald Trump?”
China? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
As for the others, their growth rates are consistently low enough that we have this impression that it's natural for an "advanced" (i.e. socialistic) economy. There are serious costs to socialism (aka "command and control"), the biggest is running out of other people's money.
On “Jack Move II”
Agreed. What we have is akin to home insurance which covers every change of lightbulb.
Agreed. IMHO Congress is poorly equipped to deal with this issue, but the math of it is that half of your lifetime useage of medical care is in the last year or two of life.
"
If you're talking about "single payer", I think it's inaccurate to think costs would go down with that in the US. That we've always flinched away from how much it'd cost indicates the opposite.
I wouldn't call it a free lunch, but if we want serious public financing of all things medical, what we need is something akin to death panels and/or other ways to keep the costs in line.
"
I think getting a 3% boost from just dealing with the tax code is extremely aggressive and probably unrealistic. Certainly the politics of it would prevent us from anything like a "single page", and the truly massive distortions have lots of support (mortgage interest for example).
I also think having a discussion about growth is useful, and a big part of that discussion should be what is the gov doing wrong and how much does it cost. Growth should be a big part of any talk about the government, and any gov program or rule.
On the "cost" side it's worth pointing out these massive social programs the left favours can't be paid for long term without growth, and a lack of growth leads to social upheaval (including both Trump's and Occupy Wall Street).
"
Only in part. Mostly I'm pointing out that we're doing things which are damaging growth, and suggesting that we try stopping those things before we declare that growth is impossible.
On “The Scorecard”
You're comparing Twitter posting to nuclear wars? Rather than social media, do you have him swinging punches? Supposedly he's violently out of control on a regular basis, right?
Strangely? Going public with them was really bad for Romney.
Trump plays pretty rough fiscally, and clearly uses the rules to his own benefit. However this issue is whether that's a bad thing.
I think he lies about being worth 10 Billion. Forbes thinks he's only worth 4 Billion.
On “Jack Move II”
We have 800,000 people whose jobs are to help others fill out tax forms. If we includes businesses we'd be above a million. Are you seriously claiming this adds value to the economy?
Or that an inhumanly complex tax code doesn't cause economic distortions and unintended consequences? Or that really large bureaucracies don't increase overhead, which in turn are passed to consumers?
"
Agreed.
The entire "Trump" protest is, imho, something which would never have happened if we had a decent level of growth.
Put differently, if Obama had done a decent job on the economy, Hillary would have won with a "4 more years" slogan. All of these policies and short term trade offs which put growth last have long term consequences.
On “The Scorecard”
You're suggesting that he's so unstable he could start a nuclear war on a whim.
This is the same guy who marries gold-diggers and manages to keep his money, manages to increase his money, and manages to raise really functional children who turn into functional adults. His personality flaws always seem to increase the public eye on him and seem... not so much calculated as cultivated to work to his advantage. He's been doing this for 50 years, if he were actually unstable he'd have melted down long before now...
...and he personally would lose hundreds of millions (or Billions) of dollars in a nuclear war which probably guaranties our safety right there.
"
Every one of which carefully evaluated and polled for maximum impact and minimum offence. And none of which she believed because there was this vast difference between what she said in public and what she said in private. She's for whatever is popular at the moment and against whatever is unpopular at the moment. You can add that to her list of negatives.
"
This is like saying William Shatner liked beating people up just because Captain Kirk did.
At the moment Trump is a blank slate. What we know of him is a straw-man created by his public act and the insults of his political foes.
Think of him as Obama, 8 years ago, except Trump has a track record of private sector success.
Hopefully you don't get to be a multi-billionaire without some level of sanity; And the reports from the people who know him personally support the idea that it is an manipulative act (which admittedly he's really comfortable with).
"
She's got no message other than "it's my turn."
She's very old and not charismatic.
Despite having far more money and support, she lost to an unknown 8 years ago.
She's been openly mixing her personal and public business since then to the point where she's got more than 150 million dollars.
She carries all the baggage of the various ethical scandals from previous decades.
I'm excluding fixing the primary election again Bernie and the email server because these things weren't known two years ago, but it was really well known this was the sort of thing she ran around doing as a matter of habit.
I don't know if Sanders could have won, but Biden could have just because he wasn't Trump and didn't have anywhere near the baggage and ethics issues Clinton did.
Does anyone know if Biden is charismatic? I've never heard him give a speech.
On “Jack Move II”
@brandon-berg @j-r
Advanced economies uniformly have governments which adopt growth hobbling policies. The problem is the policies, not the "advanced" part.
Only 10% of GDP spent on the government. "Magic" indeed.
http://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Singapore/Government_size/
"
Simplicity is much harder to game than complexity.
The current tax code is deliberately made complex because of Congress having been captured by layer after layer of special interests, and because of Congress trying to use the tax code to micromanage the economy and pick winners and losers, and because Congress uses the tax code as a stick/carrot to drum up campaign contributions.
Then after Congress gets done with that the rules are handed over to a bureaucracy which uses their "interpretation" of these rules to empire build, and large complex companies often defensively build their own bureaucracies (which also empire build) to deal with the gov's.
So how much of a growth hit do we take because of this mess? 1%? 2%? If it's 3% then a full fix takes us to 5% growth right there... however we'd be asking Congress to give up a lot of power, fund extorting ability, and face down a lot of upset people.
Millions of people lose their jobs. Without it's tax breaks, green energy probably dies. Lots of people (myself included) have too much house if their mortgage isn't tax deductible.
And that all that would be worth it for 5% growth.
On “Stephen Bush: Would Bernie Sanders have done better against Donald Trump?”
Sanders would have convinced me to vote for Trump rather than Johnson. One of the hallmarks of socialism is food shortages. That makes my involvement personal and is a big enough threat that Trump easily becomes the lesser evil.
Also Sanders never had bricks thrown at him. The DNC and RNC both went really light on him, if he'd been the actual nominee the gloves would have come off.
On “The Scorecard”
Impeach him and Pence is in charge. Pence is a solid conservative, Trump is a Rino.
I don't understand why Pence would be an improvement from your point of view.
"
Ferguson, the father of 'hands up don't shoot', was burned because of a lie. The "unarmed" criminal attacked a cop, tried to take his gun, and then continued.
On “Jack Move II”
How much economic distortion do we get from the tax code? How much from regulatory capture, how much could we gain from more free trade, immigration, from a fully functional educational system, etc?
I think 5% is possible on paper, I also think it'd take multiple massive political upheavals to get to it.
For example, going to a flat tax (or something describable on one page of paper) would mean most every tax attorney/accountant is out of work. Company bureaucracies would shrink, and the overhead associated with this would fall, although fundamentally we'd be shifting unproductive resources to productive resources, we'd be digesting the economic disruption for years.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.