[Discussion] Welcome to the Biden Administration!

Anything related to Biden and his upcoming administration. May this thread be less active and controversial as that last guys thread.

mudbunny wrote:
LouZiffer wrote:

I'm guessing the estimates still assume America's outrageously inflated pricing?

I would assume it would be lower, as the government is not expected to run a profit, unlike private health care.

Not if it's Medicare, which doesn't provide the care, doctors, nurses, staff, medicine, supplies, durable medical, facilities, etc. About the only thing they wouldn't need a profit on are the insurance premiums (in this case in the form of taxes). They would take the place of the insurance company. The other things are the inflated stuff I'm taking about.

mudbunny wrote:
peanut3141 wrote:

A lowball estimate for the cost of medicare for all is $3T annually. The defense budget, bloated as it is, is less than $1T. To keep this on topic, Biden would get zero traction claiming trimming the defense budget could pay for it. We'd either need to raise taxes or embark on long-term deficit spending at historically high levels.

How much (and this is a serious question, I honestly don't know) does the American public currently pay towards healthcare premiums and health care that would otherwise be covered by this hypothetical M4A? Also keep in mind that if it is modeled partially after Canada (eh!), for many people, it is partially covered by their employer.

The American public pays a tremendous amount for health care, both publicly and privately funded. This chart shows American total spending vs other developed countries:

IMAGE(https://img.datawrapper.de/3bkwn/full.png)

In addition to paying nearly twice as much, we get really sh*tty outcomes, mostly related to the incredibly uneven allocation of healthcare. The first dollars spent on each person do the most work, especially when they're preventative.

It's entirely reasonable to expect that long term we can bring our total spending down near other countries and improve our outcomes. But I don't think bringing prices down will happen instantly and even the most rosy predictions I've seen (including that prior Sanders link) acknowledge additional revenue will be necessary over the next decade. M4A should result in shrinking that total green & blue bar to a smaller mostly green bar. But the green, public portion is expected to grow in absolute terms as well as a percentage of the whole.

It can be easily argued that those additional taxes are less costly than the out-of-pocket premiums and deductibles you're alluding to. Most projections, even by conservative think tanks agree on that point.
But it does imply greater taxation and tackling that head on is a better strategy than trying to avoid the issue. Yes, a typical American might pay $2k more in taxes, but you'll avoid >$4k/year in premiums alone. That's the argument to be made and one that I think can be successful. p*ssyfooting around that reality makes the entire proposition seem shady.

Biden can finally obtain access to the President's daily brief

I imagine at this point it looks something like this.

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page 2 Redacted
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JC wrote:

Biden can finally obtain access to the President's daily brief

I imagine at this point it looks something like this.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/06W1zLk.jpg)

page 2 Redacted
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Word count is to high.

Me, three pages ago, apparently, in this thread:

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I knew someone would cite the ACA after I posted that comment. I stand by my "very little" descriptor of what was accomplished. I don't think I can add anything to what was already said in this thread. The ACA has done wonders for private health insurance profits. Not so much for the American people. Our spending is still way higher, and health outcomes worse, than any other country that is considered our socio-economic colleague.

Reaper81 wrote:

Word count is too high.

That's not entirely fair. It's way less than 140 characters.

Besides, the problem isn't that Trump doesn't know that Americans are getting killed, it's just that he doesn't care.

It's hilarious to think companies would take the money they are paying in insurance premiums and give it to their employees instead of their board members and shareholders.

Adorable.

Mixolyde wrote:

It's hilarious to think companies would take the money they are paying in insurance premiums and give it to their employees instead of their board members and shareholders.

Adorable.

It's a feature of the system, not a bug.

Mixolyde wrote:

It's hilarious to think companies would take the money they are paying in insurance premiums and give it to their employees instead of their board members and shareholders.

Adorable.

That's why it needs to be incentivized. Because yes, you're absolutely right, most of them would not do the right thing on their own.

And while we're at it, put an end to stock buybacks and the other methods executives use to enrich themselves while stifling innovation, bankrupting their company, and costing workers' jobs.

Oh, and close the tax loopholes that allow corporations to pay even less than the already meager sums they're supposed to.

Corporations used to be "good" citizens. There was a time when it actually mattered how they treated their workers, their neighborhoods, and their contributions to the nation(s). That time is long gone, and the current crop of executives for the most part aren't going to change their measure of success from "shareholder supremacy" to anything else willingly, but with the right people in power we can certainly begin to force their hand.

r013nt0 wrote:

Corporations used to be "good" citizens. There was a time when it actually mattered how they treated their workers, their neighborhoods, and their contributions to the nation(s).

Interested to know when in history you're referring to.

Because I'm hard pressed to pick a single decade in the last 200 years that I could say that about, instead of pointing to whatever the appropriate version of top-hatted men sending children up chimneys is for that decade.

Jonman wrote:
r013nt0 wrote:

Corporations used to be "good" citizens. There was a time when it actually mattered how they treated their workers, their neighborhoods, and their contributions to the nation(s).

Interested to know when in history you're referring to.

Because I'm hard pressed to pick a single decade in the last 200 years that I could say that about, instead of pointing to whatever the appropriate version of top-hatted men sending children up chimneys is for that decade.

A few history books I've been reading, actually. Here's a bit of relevant context. It would take me a bit of time to search through other books and pull up more quotes though. The highlights are just my notes, not current suggestions for you to read while ignoring the rest.

IMAGE(https://i.ibb.co/QkTqjF1/image.png)
IMAGE(https://i.ibb.co/CmmjyWp/image.png)

At certain times in history the government made corporations be good citizens by passing rules and laws that protected ordinary people. Then corporations figured out that they could control the government and could make the rules themselves, or by proxy.

And now we're truly F'd because corporations believe they are people and can make their own rules because the government says as much.

IMAGE(https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JYdRcjZXnrw/UDR7xuR_06I/AAAAAAAAAjs/0VipkFi4_14/s1600/2011-08-15-romney-corporations-are-people.jpg)

edit: r013nt0'hausered on explaining the rise of shareholder value theory, so I'll just leave the link from that part: LINK

I saw a piece the other day that, if we're talking about America at least, condenses a whole lot into one paragraph (LINK):

Historically speaking, the Democratic Party has been an unstable electoral coalition since at least the Civil War, when it represented both native-born white Protestants in the South and immigrant white Catholics in the North. Those groups disliked and distrusted each other, but at least perceived a common enemy in the bankers and patrician classes of Boston and New York (and also, less salubriously, in Black people attempting to assert their right to citizenship).

When the party of Big Business and Finance also became the party of Jim Crow--and centrist Democrats became corporate Democrats trying to find a 'Third Way'--businesses did get more and more rapacious.

Yep, here's some more on Third Way from another book.

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Have any of that history been written from the perspective of the labor movement? Because to the best of my knowledge, that's been a neverending struggle just to get corporations to act with basic decency towards their employees. There hasn't been a period when organized labor has been all "go home guys, we're all good here".

It has never been all good, no. Both of the books I have quoted above are certainly from the perspective of labor in that one is pretty staunchly anti-Capitalist and the other is written by a lefty British economist.

But in the years after WWII and up through the 70s/80s, the Business Roundtable was very much taking a position that the role of corporations was to compete fairly, pay competitive salaries (that's part of competing fairly), being a part of the community, and build up the overall economy -which you can't do with massive income inequality. All of that went out the window with the rise of the Austrian and Chicago schools of economics. Supply-side, Shareholder-centric thinking.

I honestly hope that a Biden administration takes seriously the war we are currently in. The Soviets hit us with a Pearl Harbor attack four years ago with what they themselves describe as "information warfare" and we have spent the last four years pretending that nothing is happening. I sure as f*cks hope we nuke the f*ck out of them with info attacks of our own.

Paleocon wrote:

I honestly hope that a Biden administration takes seriously the war we are currently in. The Soviets hit us with a Pearl Harbor attack four years ago with what they themselves describe as "information warfare" and we have spent the last four years pretending that nothing is happening. I sure as f*cks hope we nuke the f*ck out of them with info attacks of our own.

As far as we know.

r013nt0 wrote:

But in the years after WWII and up through the 70s/80s, the Business Roundtable was very much taking a position that the role of corporations was to compete fairly, pay competitive salaries (that's part of competing fairly), being a part of the community, and build up the overall economy -which you can't do with massive income inequality. All of that went out the window with the rise of the Austrian and Chicago schools of economics. Supply-side, Shareholder-centric thinking.

I agree that this change happened, as long as there's the recognition that a lot of the "good times" only existed for white people, and white males especially. There was massive income inequality during those decades. It was more purposefully targeted at specific demographics. For a lot of folks in the US, none of the things you're listing actually existed during that time period. Not for them.

Edit: Thinking on this further, these could go hand in hand as part of this shift. Perhaps some of it is business finding legal ways to kowtow to an upper strata of society, just as it had been doing before pesky gender and race laws made that stuff illegal.

Yep, I'd agree with that.

Paleocon wrote:

I honestly hope that a Biden administration takes seriously the war we are currently in. The Soviets hit us with a Pearl Harbor attack four years ago with what they themselves describe as "information warfare" and we have spent the last four years pretending that nothing is happening. I sure as f*cks hope we nuke the f*ck out of them with info attacks of our own.

First we need to deal with the MAGAS, Proud Boys, Nazis, and GOP grifters in our country, or Trump will happen again in four years.

LouZiffer wrote:
r013nt0 wrote:

But in the years after WWII and up through the 70s/80s, the Business Roundtable was very much taking a position that the role of corporations was to compete fairly, pay competitive salaries (that's part of competing fairly), being a part of the community, and build up the overall economy -which you can't do with massive income inequality. All of that went out the window with the rise of the Austrian and Chicago schools of economics. Supply-side, Shareholder-centric thinking.

I agree that this change happened, as long as there's the recognition that a lot of the "good times" only existed for white people, and white males especially. There was massive income inequality during those decades. It was more purposefully targeted at specific demographics. For a lot of folks in the US, none of the things you're listing actually existed during that time period. Not for them.

Edit: Thinking on this further, these could go hand in hand as part of this shift. Perhaps some of it is business finding legal ways to kowtow to an upper strata of society, just as it had been doing before pesky gender and race laws made that stuff illegal.

It's important to get the whole picture (e.g. Social Security and national Labor organizing laws left out agricultural and domestic workers, which had obviously racial consequences), I'd just say it wasn't going back to do what it had before, because what was going on before wasn't just benefiting the upper strata of society.

I think the way to tie these two things together is to recognize that there was a time after the worst of the industrial age when more of the population had power and the hope of prosperity, but it was unequally distributed by race, and by the 80s even that unequal-but-broader distribution started to shrink, with the upper strata taking back more of what they'd been forced to give up during the New Deal years. It definitely ties in with race in that the story of those years is the story of a time when people became white.

Natus wrote:

First we need to deal with the MAGAS, Proud Boys, Nazis, and GOP grifters in our country, or Trump will happen again in four years.

The problem is much, much deeper than that. Getting rid of those groups would only reset us back to the conditions that created those groups.

ruhk wrote:
Natus wrote:

First we need to deal with the MAGAS, Proud Boys, Nazis, and GOP grifters in our country, or Trump will happen again in four years.

The problem is much, much deeper than that. Getting rid of those groups would only reset us back to the conditions that created those groups.

Just like defeating Germany in WW2 reset us to...wait

I know I sound like a radical on this subject, but you destroy these groups legally and extra-judicially. If that means the entire GOP, so be it. The entire MAGA & GOP front are totally unashamedly anti-democratic, and openly so. Everything is on the table. They will not let this 2020 election result occur again.

Natus wrote:
ruhk wrote:
Natus wrote:

First we need to deal with the MAGAS, Proud Boys, Nazis, and GOP grifters in our country, or Trump will happen again in four years.

The problem is much, much deeper than that. Getting rid of those groups would only reset us back to the conditions that created those groups.

Just like defeating Germany in WW2 reset us to...wait

I know I sound like a radical on this subject, but you destroy these groups legally and extra-judicially. If that means the entire GOP, so be it. The entire MAGA & GOP front are totally unashamedly anti-democratic, and openly so. Everything is on the table. They will not let this 2020 election result occur again.

IMAGE(https://media3.giphy.com/media/rgk1DxSugZDFu/giphy.gif)

(Removed Trump gif cause I can't take looking at his face anymore.)

Just discovered this thread. Tagging for when I'm not buzzed on peanut butter whiskey in my coffee.

Natus wrote:
ruhk wrote:
Natus wrote:

First we need to deal with the MAGAS, Proud Boys, Nazis, and GOP grifters in our country, or Trump will happen again in four years.

The problem is much, much deeper than that. Getting rid of those groups would only reset us back to the conditions that created those groups.

Just like defeating Germany in WW2 reset us to...wait

I know I sound like a radical on this subject, but you destroy these groups legally and extra-judicially. If that means the entire GOP, so be it. The entire MAGA & GOP front are totally unashamedly anti-democratic, and openly so. Everything is on the table. They will not let this 2020 election result occur again.

It’s not just MAGA, or Trump, or the GOP, though. These are all just symptoms. The entire country has been fundamentally broken for some time and until we go about fixing the issues driving the socioeconomic divide, bringing the capital and tech oligarchs to heel, and improving people’s material conditions, any attempts at healing the divisions that have been widening over the last 40-50 years will be a fool’s errand. You could round up all the extremists, grifters, and reactionaries and unload them on an island somewhere but without changing the conditions that created them they’d just eventually be replaced by similar groups with similar motivations.

Don't forget the evangelicals. There are millions of people that believe that Democrats, Liberals, Progressives are godless, evil and trying to take away their religion. I thought it was just about banning abortion and conservative supreme court justices up until about a month ago. I was very wrong.

fangblackbone wrote:

Don't forget the evangelicals. There are millions of people that believe that Democrats, Liberals, Progressives are godless, evil and trying to take away their religion. I thought it was just about banning abortion and conservative supreme court justices up until about a month ago. I was very wrong.

I've known for a good long time now and yet it's even worse than I thought.

The sad thing is that it really hurts people of faith who are not wackadoos.

I'm an atheist, but I know plenty of sane people who worship in one way or another, and plenty of faith-based groups that do good things without taking advantage of the government or vilifying one group or another.

That's what makes it hard to get rid of the bad influences. As soon as the heat starts coming, they'll all put on sheep clothing.