[awm]

As far as Ron Paul goes, his views (and his son Rand's) are at least consistent. They have shown a willingness to shrink government enough to balance the budget, and I applaud them for that.

With this said, their Ayn Randian view of how the country should be run is one I very much disagree with. Certainly it would save money if we didn't provide any health care to seniors or disabled people and left them to fend for themselves. It would save money if we drastically shrank our military and pulled out of world affairs. It would save money if we eliminated all government enforcement of equal rights laws, eliminated all government food and health inspections, and so forth. Ron Paul and son have endorsed all these ideas. Personally I wouldn't want to live in a country where the old and disabled are dying on the streets, where private companies are free to pursue racist and sexist policies, and where companies are free to make the calculation that a few people dying from lax safety practices is better for their bottom line than being responsible.

[hrothgar]

blackshoe, on 2011-June-22, 17:26, said:

Did I say that I think you're against pulling back the military? No, I said that you ridicule someone because you disagree with him. And asserting that things with which you disagree are "fairy tales" or "dogma" is just more of the same bullshit.

blackshoe, on 2011-June-22, 17:26, said:

And asserting that things with which you disagree are "fairy tales" or "dogma" is just more of the same bullshit.

Winston never stated that everything that he disagrees with is a "fairy tale" or "dogma".
Rather, he suggested that some of Paul's beliefs are so silly that they not only deserve to be critiqued but mocked as well and cited two specific examples:

1. Returning to the gold standard
2. Abolishing the Fed

I think that Winston's behavior is appropriate.

"Mocking" outlandish positions is a perfectly acceptable form of social sanction. There are other options like shunning or violence. However, people often say that laughter is the best medicine.

[Winstonm]

This little diversion about Ron Paul is a good example IMO of how partisanship affects real solutions being found - reducing the military and pulling back is reasonable, while returning to a gold standard is laughably naive; however, when dogma reigns - whether right wing or left - there is no distinction between good and bad ideas. There are only ideas which fit the right or left dogma.

Whichever sides does it, strict reliance upon ideology and dogma to provide solutions is stupid.

I submit three radical ideas that each side should adopt as starting points for discussions:

1) Steve Jobs is not John Galt.
2) Hillary Clinton is not the madonna.
3) It is the 21st century.

[PassedOut]

awm, on 2011-June-22, 23:14, said:

Second, it's quite possible to argue what "fair share" means. With a few exceptions, most of the people not paying federal income taxes are also not making much of an income. Many of them are families with kids subsisting on one or two minimum wage jobs, who can barely make ends meet.

It is perfectly fair for my taxes to be proportionately higher than those of folks who've had a harder time of it. I think I've worked hard, but so have those people. Many of my advantages arose from blind chance, such as growing up in a family that valued both education and enterprise tremendously. And I've been lucky to avoid random catastrophies, as well as the potential consequences of foolish things I did as a young man. Others have not.

[PassedOut]

Winstonm, on 2011-June-23, 06:27, said:

when dogma reigns - whether right wing or left - there is no distinction between good and bad ideas. There are only ideas which fit the right or left dogma.

Whichever sides does it, strict reliance upon ideology and dogma to provide solutions is stupid.

I couldn't agree more.

Fareed Zakaria discussed this very point in Time magazine: How Today's Conservatism Lost Touch with Reality

Quote

When considering health care, for example, Republicans confidently assert that their ideas will lower costs, when we simply do not have much evidence for this. What we do know is that of the world's richest countries, the U.S. has by far the greatest involvement of free markets and the private sector in health care. It also consumes the largest share of GDP, with no significant gains in health on any measurable outcome. We need more market mechanisms to cut medical costs, but Republicans don't bother to study existing health care systems anywhere else in the world. They resemble the old Marxists, who refused to look around at actual experience. "I know it works in practice," the old saw goes, "but does it work in theory?"

Those on both the right and left who insist on foisting their cockamamie schemes on the rest of us, based on their unproven theories, represent two sides of the very same coin. In fact the claimed benefits of the tax policies that today's congress imposes on the US are not only unproven: they've been disproven by the reality of the past decade.

This post has been edited by PassedOut: 2011-June-23, 14:22

[Winstonm]

With the U.S. borrowing $0.40 of every $1 spent, it seems necessary to address the deficit, the debt, and spending/revenues - but now is not the time.

The error being made IMO is the idea that what we have experienced is a run-of-the-mill recession based on the business cycle rather than a credit/debt event that has more in common with the Great Depression than any minor business fluctuation.

The primary concern right now must be jobs. There can be no prolonged or sustained recovery with 16% underemployed or unemployed. The wealthiest have been able to take advantage of the worldwide wage arbitrage. It surely must be time to take back part of the windfall and create jobs here at home. The crumbling airports, bridges, highways, and dams call out for federal intervention.

Boeing will just have to make do with less gravy - and build fewer wasteful drones.

[hotShot]

Just to get it right:

A party lead by president A (called party a) started wars, ruined the state finances and left country in a messy state with an economic crisis going on.
So a new president let 's call him B is elected, and his party has a small majority , but they can hardly act freely because of wars that are going on and because the government is short of money.
President A had 8 years to mess things up and since president B did not clean that mess up within 2 years, at the "intermediate" elections some followers of president B lose their parliament seats. Now president B is blocked by party A, because he does not have a majority any more.

Is the next step the election of a president c supported by party A, to mess up things even more?

[PassedOut]

Winstonm, on 2011-June-23, 07:34, said:

It surely must be time to take back part of the windfall and create jobs here at home. The crumbling airports, bridges, highways, and dams call out for federal intervention.

Yes, take that money and build up the infrastructure. It's way past time for some nation building at home.

[luke warm]

awm, on 2011-June-22, 23:14, said:

First, it's not true that 50% of people don't pay taxes. What's true is that roughly this percentage don't pay federal income taxes.

i should have been more specific... that is, of course, what i meant

PassedOut, on 2011-June-23, 07:57, said:

Yes, take that money and build up the infrastructure. It's way past time for some nation building at home.

if i were dictator, this would be one of my plans...

awm, on 2011-June-22, 23:22, said:

Personally I wouldn't want to live in a country where the old and disabled are dying on the streets, where private companies are free to pursue racist and sexist policies, and where companies are free to make the calculation that a few people dying from lax safety practices is better for their bottom line than being responsible.

demagogue much?

[hrothgar]

luke warm, on 2011-June-23, 09:05, said:

AWM wrote

> Personally I wouldn't want to live in a country where the old and disabled are dying on the streets,
> where private companies are free to pursue racist and sexist policies, and where companies are free
> to make the calculation that a few people dying from lax safety practices is better for their
> bottom line than being responsible.

demagogue much?

As I recall, Ron Paul has specifically stated that the federal government doesn't have the authority to stop private companies from discriminating on the basis of race or sex.

If you'd like, I can dredge up some of his comments on OSHA, Medicaid, and social security...

[Winstonm]

As an aside, I went to me doctor yesterday for a routine physical and the talk got around to fixing healthcare - my doctor volunteered that he wasn't so sure that using a profit-driven business model was the best approach.

I had to agree. Seems simple when even the ones profiting from the system (and in a red state and ever redder city) find this system a poor choice for healthcare delivery.

[Winstonm]

I also sometimes wonder what would happen if those who support the current capitalist-business model of healthcare felt that same impact in all public systems.

What would be the charge for electricity delivered from the Boeing Hoover Dam or the cost of traveling coast-to-coast on the Goldman Sachs Interstate Highay system, and what shape would the owners have those dams and roads?

Of course, the answer would be that if you didn't like it you could always use whale oil lamps and drive the back roads.

But to my way of thinking, progress is not made by walking backwards.

[luke warm]

Winstonm, on 2011-June-23, 17:11, said:

As an aside, I went to me doctor yesterday for a routine physical and the talk got around to fixing healthcare - my doctor volunteered that he wasn't so sure that using a profit-driven business model was the best approach.

did he happen to mention how he wanted to be paid, or upon what basis? of course it's possible you have a doctor who has already paid off his student loans

[Winstonm]

luke warm, on 2011-June-24, 15:32, said:

did he happen to mention how he wanted to be paid, or upon what basis? of course it's possible you have a doctor who has already paid off his student loans

As a matter of fact we did talk about his student loans and the fee for service model. We also talked about liability insurance costs to physicians and the cost of administrating the current model.

There are better models available - not perfect but better. But we have to be willing to do something other than cloak ourselves in dogmatic rhetoric to get anything accomplished.

[luke warm]

one thing that drives up the costs of even "routine" medical procedures is the independence of certain ancillary providers (anesthesiologists, radiologists, emergency room doctors, lab facilities)... these disciplines, at least in louisiana, seldom contract with insurance companies because they feel they don't have to... they take the (out of network) payment from the company, of course, then bust the patient with the bill's balance... so i can see a system in which certain ancillary charges are figured into the cost of a procedure, as a flat rate

i still think your doctor is in the minority, though

[Winstonm]

Quote

i still think your doctor is in the minority, though

That may be, but retaining a capitalistic-business model because some students chose medicine thinking they may acquire wealth is an unsatisfactory answer as well. Do we really want our healthcare to be run on the same business fundamentals as our automotive industry?

The wealthier should be able to opt out and drive their Lexus healthcare models, but for the bottom 95% of Americans, a genuinely usable public transportation system healthcare model would be nice.

[y66]

The Immutable Laws

by Maxine Kumin

Never buy land on a slope, my father declared
the week before his heart gave out.
We bit down hard on a derelict dairy farm
of tilting fields, hills, humps and granite outcrops.

Never bet what you can't afford to lose,
he lectured. I bet my soul on a tortured horse
who never learned to love, but came to trust me.

Spend your money close to where you earn it,
he dictated. Nothing made him crosser
than wives who drove to New York to go shopping
when Philly stores had everything they needed.

This, the grab bag of immutable laws
circa 1940 when I was the last
child left at home to be admonished:

Only borrow what you know you can repay.
Your mother used to run up dress-shop bills
the size of the fifth Liberty Loan,
his private hyperbole. It took me years

to understand there'd been five loans
launched to finance the First World War,
the one he fought in, the war to end all wars.

What would this man who owed no man, who kept
his dollars folded in a rubber band,
have thought of credit cards, banking online?
Wars later, clear as water, I hear him say

reconcile your checkbook monthly, and oh!
always carry a clean handkerchief.

from Where I Live: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010. © W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. Reprinted with permission at The Writer's Almanac.

[kenberg]

Growing up in the middle of the last century, I can say that people had mixed opinions as to, say, whether Moses really was found in a stream. There were no mixed opinions about debt. It was to be avoided.

[Bbradley62]

kenberg, on 2011-June-26, 09:41, said:

Growing up in the middle of the last century... There were no mixed opinions about debt. It was to be avoided.

Except, of course, to get a 30-year mortgage with 10% down, because a house is always a good investment.

[kenberg]

I figured someone would mention mortgages. And if course it is so, there were banks back then and they lent money to home buyers.

I don't live in the past, but it is perhaps useful to acknowledge that the attitude toward debt really was different. A mortgage was often the only debt a family had. In my family it had been paid off, at least by the time I was 13 or so and came to know of these things, and to the best of my knowledge my father never bought anything else on credit. I am not counting the small tabs at the grocery where I would be sent to get things without having to carry money. These tabs were paid in full by the end of the week.

Constant, and large, debt is now a way of life for many. It's a whole different way of looking at things, or at least it seems so to me.

Anyway, the remembered attitudes of Maxine Kumin's piece seemed familiar to me. I don't want to dwell on it.