Shoresy

Medical costs are too high in this country where 80 of us costing too much is due to that.

That's a problem that started around when you guys made emergency healthcare free to the poor back in the late 1980's. Before then, your costs were way way lower. You got the 80 number right. When the government started passing bills to use taxes to keep the hospitals from closing up, that's when the costs REALLY took off, because the government dosn't know how to spend money like an individual does. The hospitals encouraged costly procedures since the government wasn't ever going to say no.

If you want prices to go back to before then, you have to eliminate this problem. If you want to give welfare to the poor, give them cash directly for healthcare, and if the poor choose to blow the money on drugs and fast food and they die, ce la vie. Government should not be making robotic choices for basic life choices. Do not EVER give it to the hospitals! (or insurance companies)... that's how you get out of control services and costs.

Every other developed country spends half as much as us including places like China and India and Russia. If they can do it so can we

These are countries that CAN say no to hospitals asking for outrageous amounts of money because, in a more totalitarian government, there is no consequence for breaking a promise to provide the best healthcare for everyone. Everyone gets the minimum standard, no matter how long it takes. So if you want government healthcare, you need a more totalitarian government to make it happen where they can say "no" without fear of electoral consequences. Your government is so soft today, it's too afraid to say "NO" to ANYTHING, no matter how outrageous the expenditure. If that's the tradeoff you want, sure.

an excuse to run away. Noted.

Confirmed: you are just here to "own" people. Thanks for admitting that every post from you comes from a bad-faith premise.

mindless

Thanks for proving my point. Everyone normal can clearly see your inability to perceive yourself. I hope you find all the shallowness you can owning people with your ad-homs.

Please explain

Nah, I'll pass. You seem to want to level up the definition of bad-faith discussions with repeated ad-homs. Every explanation will have diminishing chances of getting past that self-imposed barrier.

Cause apparently that’s where you can own the libs, or so you seem to think.

Projection much? You are the ad-hom factory on this site.

 the only thing the government takes over is the insurance market.

Again, Obama promised this wouldn't happen with his 40+ televised lies defending ACA about keeping your capitalized health care choices.

Why do you want more of this?

More like it makes them feel eloquent.

Obama promised ACA wouldn't become socialist, that it was just extra welfare along capitalism, and that if you liked your choice of doctor or plan, you could keep it.

That promise was broken long ago.

Then make that argument. Don't try to be deceptive.

I would prefer a single payer system,

Oh, while you are at it, argue that this isn't socialism either.

genius. 

Personal slurs are the last resort of an idiot.

Got it. So according to Shorsey;

at least in support of this socialist program. 

Ty for this 100% honest discourse on your part. No need for deception, self or otherwise.

Socialist: someone who supports the ACA

Socialist: someone who supports the ACA (a socialist program)

Your crawfish defense is literally allowing:

Racist: someone who supports the KKK (a racist organization)

But NAWWWW say it aint so.... cause reasons...  

so that I can chuck in the trash any concept that you calling someone a racist, fascist, criminal, etc... is meaningful.

Being a socialist isn't inherently bad or immoral.

Being a deceptive one assuredly is.

Red hats are the optional packet. There is always a Blue Hat car waiting in the back lot.

As long as you have the eloquence to convince your target that they are super smart. And the Eloquence to convince your target the lot across the street is so much worse and not exactly the same.

And the Eloquence to convince them to go deep into debt for it because they "deserve" the car or have a right to it. That's how you get em good.

I am for Obamacare in that it is better than the alternative we had in place at the time.

So you are a socialist, at least in support of this socialist program. Obamacare isn't welfare for the vulnerable. It's broad coverage for those who are not. Obamacare, as you well know, isn't narrowly targeted welfare for the vulnerable. Your government uses mandates, subsidies, taxes, insurance regulations, and corporate welfare for private insurance companies to spread costs and mandates across a broad population, including many people who aren't poor or otherwise unable to provide for themselves.

I would prefer a single payer system, but never really looked that deeply into it to say if it’s the best alternative.

Banning unnutritious foods from SNAP (N stands for Nutrition) is probably going to help American healthcare more than any other program before or since from the government.

A used car salesman can pass a test of eloquence.

Look what Trump did to us...

Which system provides greater opportunity to convert delayed gratification into increased personal wealth: one that allows individuals to retain more of the resulting gains, or one that progressively redistributes more of those gains?

At the very least, can you provide the exact mechanism under Capitalism that shields the one percenters from having to delay gratification to keep or grow their existing wealth?

Delayed gratification is about forgoing consumption that is available to you, not living cheaply in absolute terms. A billionaire may only spend a fraction of the returns on his investments every year, but it is still himself who CHOOSES to live off less than he could have spent, regardless of the fact that the amount is much higher than most people who spend every penny of their income.

If you can show me the mechanism, or at least some real-world examples where a one-percenter spent his entire yearly income and still grew his wealth that year, I'd be willing to concede on my part.

Let's try to find common ground here. Are you at least willing to concede that a good chunk of today's 1 percenters are there because of an extraordinary personal assimilation to a culture of delayed gratification? Or simply, is delayed gratification a significant causal factor for many of the one percenters?

Even if we assume for the sake of argument that most 1 percenters started with substantial unearned wealth or cultural advantages, would you concede that a good chunk who grew their wealth instead of shrank their wealth did so through an extraordinary commitment to delayed gratification?

When I hear "right to food, right to healthcare, right to own a home, right to ...."

This translates to an encouragement to eat all you want to, don't worry about taking care of your body, don't save up for a house, etc...

This cultural shift is straight up promoting overconsumerism through very perverse incentives. What America ends up with is a huge socio-economic class rift between the saves and the save-nots.

And I suppose if you really think about it, Socialism rewards consumption behaviors while discouraging delayed gratification. The more you consume, the more redistribution you can qualify for.

Where Capitalism truly becomes predatory is when you have an institutionalized mix of both, where delayed gratifiers use their government influence to exploit others to promote the overconsumption of the fruits of their investments. (See Big Pharma during COVID.) There's a very interesting argument to be made that a mixed system tends to perversely pair the strongest accumulators of capital with institutions that subsidize or facilitate overconsumption behaviors.

In a way, pure socialism might be better than the current mixed system while also being vastly inferior to pure capitalism without all the cronyism of a mixed system. Arguably, the mixed system is the worst of the 3 worlds because the incentives align toward the greatest exploitation eventually.

 you guys really believe that we are all nothing more than where our financial positions ended up. Luck and/or good fortune have nothing to do with it. Advantages built into our capitalistic system don’t exist, and therefore any policy that attempts to provide any kind of benefit for those towards the bottom is inherent theft from their wealthier

Please correct me if I’m wrong.

You are wrong.

The fact is simple, the normal course of wealth is to beget consumption. The rare course is to delay gratification. Sometimes that's easier for some than others due to culture. Luck might bring wealth, but not the temperament to grow it instead of consuming it. My point remains despite the straw variables you toss about. It is IMPOSSIBLE to grow wealth with zero sense of delayed gratification, no matter the starting point. Neither capitalism nor socialism can grant this temperament, but only one system rewards it.

The net is just another hole to put an object into with a stick.

The husband and father who is barely able to pay rent and put food on the table is in no position to put $2k into a stock account or towards a business venture. The single mom who has to raise her kids and care for her aging parents isn’t able to set aside funds for that online store she dreamed of. Those kinds of risks are only practical for people who already have the means, which is why every single time there’s some economic downturn those are the folks who survive. That’s not an accident, that’s how the system is designed.

So you agree, wealth begets consumption. 95% of the world lives on a fraction of the income of the average American. All those expenditures you listed are choices. Choices to take their wealth... and consume it all. Saving not even a penny. Only a rare choice to delay gratification can possibly reverse the norm.

and it won’t make a difference to the lives of a single shareholder. 

You mean like mom and pop shareholders? Pretty sure their stocks can lose value like everyone who has access to www.fidelity.com can watch their stocks lose value.

Wealth begets wealth is one of the most basic facts about capitalism, it’s not a controversial statement at all and it is so easily observable. 

Again...wealth begets consumption is the observable norm. 30 trillion spent (blown) on the war on poverty, and the poverty rate is the same as 1973. Very few Americans took all those COVID checks and logged into any of the hundreds of stock market access points.

Discipline and delayed gratification begets wealth over time. And wealth begets consumption over time.

I think this point that you’re raising is extremely telling though

What's even more telling is your concession to what Warren Buffett explained.

Hockey is just golf with added steps.

They know only how to spend what they have previously taken.

30 trillion has been spent fighting the "war on poverty" since LBJ.

The current poverty rate is close to the poverty rate in 1973.

That's a huge chunk of your country's debt right there.

turning a billion dollars into two is inevitable

The scale of capital has additional problems aside from risk. Warren Buffett has repeatedly discussed this difficulty: enormous amounts of capital are harder to compound at extraordinary rates because there are fewer opportunities large enough to materially affect the portfolio. Turning $1,000 into $2,000 requires finding $1,000 of profitable opportunity. Turning $1 billion into $2 billion requires generating another billion dollars of value. And there are quite a few people in the real world who lose money after gaining a billion in the same time frame rather than doubling it. The existence of billionaires who subsequently lose substantial portions of their wealth is itself enough to disprove “inevitable.” That alone disproves this attempted truism.

Yet a handful of billionaires his creation created still live above the rest of us while aspiring Mom and Pop store owners don’t stand a chance.

Again, those people are one Dylan Mulvaney ad away from losing all or most of that. Mom and Pop have way less to lose on one bad decision.

It’s not because they were really just that much better than everyone else,

Gonna need more than a naked declaration to prove this.

Also, you refused to address the point about the inequality of risk-taking culture vs. risk-averse cultures. So that point remains uncontested as the only defined and uncontested inequality. Increased capital and securities almost always translates to increased risk, along with the wealth potential you ascribed.

I know you really want the "wealth begets wealth" to be a truism, but the above and the real world prove it can never be. Putting that increased capital to work exposes it to increased risk, the very variable your argument keeps ignoring conveniently.

Thank you for taking the rage bait.

Thank you for taking the rage bait AI.

This is why evil exists in Russia. Trump is making you write these things.

Purposelessness is expensive.

There are wide number of options to justify not reproducing, one of most popular being "And why should I reproduce?".

Which usually stems from a general lack of purpose. Atheism brings solace in a world with no purpose.