They were mentioned a lot when the ACA was being discussed. But of course at the time (and afterwards) the GOP has refused absolutely to propose anything at al, to replace the status quo ante or the ACA.
The GOP understood they were frozen out of the ACA discussion at the start.
This was a once-in-a-generation chance for the Left to give America socialised medicine, and the discussion was between the Left and the far Left. I can not picture Obama standing up to the far Left to make the GOP included. From his point of view he was right, and making nice with the GOP was actually a bad idea for multiple reasons.
Not only was the GOP wrong, but they knew themselves that they were wrong and were just against socialised medicine for narrow selfish reasons. The ACA was going to work, it was crafted by the greatest minds, it was going to reduce medical costs, expand coverage, encourage growth, and be popular with the public. Why should the GOP get any credit, or have any input? Their role was to be the villains of the piece for opposing this for the last 50+ years.
It wasn't until the Dems realised it wasn't going to be popular that they looked for a vote or three, and by then the GOP realised it was a train wreck. If the ACA was popular with the public they would have backed off, and if it had worked as advertised it would be popular.
In Michigan a generation ago the Dems, as a joke, submitted a bill to the governor ending school funding (with nothing replacing it). The idea was to show up the governor for having submitted no ideas on what to do instead of what they currently had. Instead he signed it, and with no funding at all for schools, all sides were forced to sit down and come up with something reasonable. Nothing concentrates minds like a noose.
Hopefully if the ACA is blown up we'll see something like that... but we'll see.
Are you suggesting Gore wasn't trying to count the Dem ballots differently? The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that he couldn't do that.
Seven justices (the five Justice majority plus Breyer and Souter) agreed that there was an Equal Protection Clause violation in using different standards of counting in different counties.[30] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore#Decision
IMHO they should have stopped there, but that's a different issue.
By Trump rules, it shouldn’t create any additional expenditures, say, paying the person you hire.
If the person in question wants to work for nothing, why should the government have the power to say "no"?
My mom worked in the church office for nothing (it's called 'volunteering'). I've worked for less than nothing (partner in a company losing money).
I've worked for less than what I deserved just to get experience. Opportunity knocks at work, it was stunningly useful to be at work and get those skills.
it seems like the Democrats are getting sternly lectured for not pretending that they’re going to bring back those jobs that aren’t going to come back.
My problem with the Dems on this issue is they tend to believe that job creation is a privilege given to employers, not a right. Creating a job shouldn't require a team of lawyers and accountants, it shouldn't be larded up with mandates and fees, and you shouldn't have to prove x/y/z.
We as a society should want creating a job to be the First thing an employer wants to try for fixing a problem, not the last. That means creating that job should be really easy and risk free.
Ideally we want lots of employers competing for employees, so much so that demand/supply increases the income going to employees.
? Almost all assassinations in the US have been the result of lone-lunatics. Excluding those, we basically have nothing; Lincoln and MLK stand out as exceptions but needing to reach that far back proves the point.
“Simplify the tax code” is just another form of “waste, fraud and abuse”. It’s a magic talisman, a simple solution to complex problems. Might as well add in tiger-protecting rocks.
Reagan actually did it, worked decently well too.
And while "simple" it's actually really hard. There's a lot of vested interests here, including Congress, who don't want this problem fixed.
But that logic also applies to libertarian changes to the status quo as much as it does to anyone else’s. You can’t just assume that you can make this change to things then it will naturally work out awesome.
This is like saying that just because we increase demand, decrease supply, and impose price controls, we don't *know* that we'll have shortages.
That's True, but all outcomes are not equally likely, shortages is the way to bet.
We're having problems with growth, and we're looking at growth choking policies, which were created by self interested parties to benefit them at the expense of everyone else... the way to bet is that these policies are in fact causing problems, and should be reevaluated for just how expensive they are.
And how come he regularly engages in cheap/obvious fraud like Trump University?
For the same reason Walmart/Target end up in trouble for selling things they shouldn't or not letting employees take toilet breaks. Similarly I don't hold Obama responsible every time a federal cop/solider commits rape or murder.
Trump is both a franchise and upper-management. He's never going to meet everyone who works for him, he's never going to understand every idea that is claimed to be "his". After you hit a certain company size, it's expected that you're going to have problems and not every idea is going to work out. It's even expected that you're going to be sued for misbehaviour done by you. Scale matters, a lot.
One of the most predictive people in all of this has been Scott Adams, who has been dissecting Trump's moves from the start, explaining why/what/how Trump was advancing, and predicting his eventual victory. Knowing how the magician does his magic is informative and takes a lot of the mystery away.
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.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Jack Move II”
The GOP understood they were frozen out of the ACA discussion at the start.
This was a once-in-a-generation chance for the Left to give America socialised medicine, and the discussion was between the Left and the far Left. I can not picture Obama standing up to the far Left to make the GOP included. From his point of view he was right, and making nice with the GOP was actually a bad idea for multiple reasons.
Not only was the GOP wrong, but they knew themselves that they were wrong and were just against socialised medicine for narrow selfish reasons. The ACA was going to work, it was crafted by the greatest minds, it was going to reduce medical costs, expand coverage, encourage growth, and be popular with the public. Why should the GOP get any credit, or have any input? Their role was to be the villains of the piece for opposing this for the last 50+ years.
It wasn't until the Dems realised it wasn't going to be popular that they looked for a vote or three, and by then the GOP realised it was a train wreck. If the ACA was popular with the public they would have backed off, and if it had worked as advertised it would be popular.
In Michigan a generation ago the Dems, as a joke, submitted a bill to the governor ending school funding (with nothing replacing it). The idea was to show up the governor for having submitted no ideas on what to do instead of what they currently had. Instead he signed it, and with no funding at all for schools, all sides were forced to sit down and come up with something reasonable. Nothing concentrates minds like a noose.
Hopefully if the ACA is blown up we'll see something like that... but we'll see.
On “The Scorecard”
Are you suggesting Gore wasn't trying to count the Dem ballots differently? The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that he couldn't do that.
Seven justices (the five Justice majority plus Breyer and Souter) agreed that there was an Equal Protection Clause violation in using different standards of counting in different counties.[30] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore#Decision
IMHO they should have stopped there, but that's a different issue.
On “Jack Move II”
Or alternatively we would get rid of the things which hobble growth.
Unfortunately I see no sign that Trump has any idea what to do about growth, or even that it's a problem.
On “Stephen Bush: Would Bernie Sanders have done better against Donald Trump?”
You'd prefer Poland (which also had empty store shelves)?
On “Jack Move II”
If the person in question wants to work for nothing, why should the government have the power to say "no"?
My mom worked in the church office for nothing (it's called 'volunteering'). I've worked for less than nothing (partner in a company losing money).
I've worked for less than what I deserved just to get experience. Opportunity knocks at work, it was stunningly useful to be at work and get those skills.
"
My problem with the Dems on this issue is they tend to believe that job creation is a privilege given to employers, not a right. Creating a job shouldn't require a team of lawyers and accountants, it shouldn't be larded up with mandates and fees, and you shouldn't have to prove x/y/z.
We as a society should want creating a job to be the First thing an employer wants to try for fixing a problem, not the last. That means creating that job should be really easy and risk free.
Ideally we want lots of employers competing for employees, so much so that demand/supply increases the income going to employees.
On “The Scorecard”
? Almost all assassinations in the US have been the result of lone-lunatics. Excluding those, we basically have nothing; Lincoln and MLK stand out as exceptions but needing to reach that far back proves the point.
On “Jack Move II”
Reagan actually did it, worked decently well too.
And while "simple" it's actually really hard. There's a lot of vested interests here, including Congress, who don't want this problem fixed.
"
This is like saying that just because we increase demand, decrease supply, and impose price controls, we don't *know* that we'll have shortages.
That's True, but all outcomes are not equally likely, shortages is the way to bet.
We're having problems with growth, and we're looking at growth choking policies, which were created by self interested parties to benefit them at the expense of everyone else... the way to bet is that these policies are in fact causing problems, and should be reevaluated for just how expensive they are.
On “The Scorecard”
For the same reason Walmart/Target end up in trouble for selling things they shouldn't or not letting employees take toilet breaks. Similarly I don't hold Obama responsible every time a federal cop/solider commits rape or murder.
Trump is both a franchise and upper-management. He's never going to meet everyone who works for him, he's never going to understand every idea that is claimed to be "his". After you hit a certain company size, it's expected that you're going to have problems and not every idea is going to work out. It's even expected that you're going to be sued for misbehaviour done by you. Scale matters, a lot.
One of the most predictive people in all of this has been Scott Adams, who has been dissecting Trump's moves from the start, explaining why/what/how Trump was advancing, and predicting his eventual victory. Knowing how the magician does his magic is informative and takes a lot of the mystery away.
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.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.