How Does Republican Platform Help Middle Class?

The United States is the only First World nation without universal health care. THE ONLY ONE.In any other first-world nation, if you get sick, you're covered. Not all of them are single payer, but all of them have coverage. No other first-world nation in the world uses the American model of healthcare.Does this mean that you consider every other first-world nation in the world to be socialist? Are Canada, England, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and others all socialist hellholes?Here's a clue - the United States has a lower average life expectancy, a higher infant mortality rate and a lower average standard of living than those countries.What does that mean to you, Coyote?

Only if you completely change your own internal goals and priorities.What I find particularly disappointing is how little the Democrat platform actually seeks to help the middle class. They're definitely better than the Republicans, don't get me wrong, but neither party seems to be overly interested by the fact the General Electric this year will pay a total tax of $0, or the fact that a removal of the cap on Social Security taxes would immediately make SS solvent for the foreseeable future, etc. Nobody wants to talk about cutting Defense spending so that we don;t have to let our own citizens die of starvation or from lack of medical care. It's all "raise taxes" and "cut programs," but almost always looking at the wrong taxes and the wrong programs.

Jar, do you have a source for that quote? Just curious, I'd like to have a source before I start repeating that one.That said, it's historically true that successful major social programs will gain a party significant public favor, so I don;t exactly doubt the accuracy.Wouldn't it be nice if we lived in fantasy la-la-land, where politicians cared more about helping the people they represent than whether they'll still be in Congress in four years? If we had enough reps willing to fall on their swords to get a single-payer option passed, and if it was successful, we'd all be better off in the medium and long term even if those reps saw a short-term conservative smear campaign.Oh well. That's just fantasy. On the positive side, at least health care facts have been floating around more than they used to. Statistics showing the inferiority of the US system are now passed around at Starbucks and are all over the internet; younger generations are being exposed to the idea that, maybe the US isn't so exceptional, maybe we don't do everything better just because AMERICA FUCK YEAH, maybe we can learn lessons from other nations.I wish we had billboards every 50 miles on every freeway in the country listing the per-capita costs of healthcare, the infant mortality rate, and so on in Canada vs the US.At least insurers can no longer deny coverage for pre-existing conditions. That will save lives - if I hadn't been able to put her on my insurance as a domestic partner, it would have saved my girlfriend's life.

Wow. You know, it's really, really easy to judge someone when you have no fucking idea what their financial situation was at the time. You don;t know how much he was making. You don't know how much his insurance premium would have been. You don't know the available rents in his area. You don;t know how old the kids were, why the wife wasn;t working, or why they had two car payments. You don;t even know why he didn;t get insurance from his employer.And yet, despite your utter lack of any knowledge of the situation whatsoever, you're somehow able to play Captain Hindsight and tell him what he should have done, what he could have done, and tell him that his lack of insurance was a personal choice.What an amazing gift you must have, to be able to make financial judgments without the use of any numbers whatsoever and without knowing even the most basic facts! Please, oh wise guru, tell me what I should be doing with my money! Clearly you don;t need to know my income, where I live, where I work, the number of dependents I have, or any other information, you can just tell me what I can do anyway!I wonder what options are out here in the real world?I just went to Bluecross.com and grabbed a quick quote for a family plan with 2 28-year-old parents and three children aged 5, 6, and 7. I have no idea the actual ages involved so I just made some up - but you shouldn't mind that, since you're making up all the numbers.The absolute cheapest plan is $283. It has an $8000 deductible. Maternity costs are not covered at all (and having a baby is expensive). Everything is $0...after that $8000 deductible. Brand prescriptions aren't covered at all - have an illness that requires a new drug for treatment and doesn't have a generic available? There are lots of those...too bad though, not covered.The rest of the financial picture is unknown, of course. 2 car payments, rent, supporting 3 kids, himself and his wife...that's pretty pricey. Where I live, the cheapest apartment you can get would be a $500/month studio...but it wouldn't be legal to have 3 kids in a tiny studio. For shitty apartments in crime-infested areas, you're looking at $800/month for a 2-bedroom, at least $900 for a 3. Food for three people? Well, my minimum monthly budged for food is $350 for two - but let's say he's a better/more frugal shopper than I am (good luck, I said minimum budget for a reason, NICE food comes out of the disposable budget) and say he can feed 5 people on $400. We'll say his power bill is the same as mine - that's another $150 on average. Two car payments and insurance? What, $400 for the two payments if they're inexpensive cars, plus another $200 for the insurance? He said it was 50 miles to work...so they'll be spending at least $100 on gas every month, even where gas is cheap.SO, without any discretionary spending, we're looking at $2050/month...and we haven't even added in a phone or the health insurance or clothing or any sort of costs for the kids yet.That's about $24,600 a year. The health insurance would add another $3420 per year...and that's with the absolute cheapest plan, and it assumes he never actually uses the coverage. Doctor visits, prescriptions, everything still costs more beyond just the premium.I wonder how much he was making, take-home? I've made less than the $30,000 per year take-home that he would have needed to make just to keep the bare necessities running at several jobs. WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK TAXES ARE?Your taxes support the fire department, and the police department, and the roads in your area, and schools, and a thousand other things necessary for modern living. You never actually use the vast majority of them. Everyone pays into fire/police protection, but they only get used rarely. Everyone pays into road maintenance, but you only drive on a small percentage of the roads you help pay for. Everyone pays into the public school system, even if you don;t have kids attending.Society runs on having many people pay a little for things that benefit all of us.Yet for some reason, assholes like you think that health care should be different. If your neighbor gets sick, you can catch it, same as a fire that threatens your neighbor can threaten your home. And of course there's that pesky moral issue - where not providing universal health care according to need instead of according to ability to pay means that you are literally condemning poor people to die simply for the crime of being poor. You're condemning people to choose between letting themselves die, or going to the doctor and saving their life only to owe massive debt for the rest of their lives.And guess what tax-funded single-payer health care does? It saves money! It spreads the risk to everyone, everyone pays according to what they can actually afford with a progressive tax plan, and everyone is given care according to what they actually need instead of just what they can afford, just like the fucking police and fire department and schools. It lets the single-payer entity bargain for better drug prices. It lets the single-payer entity streamline health care costs and eliminate unnecessary redundancy - like having 4 competing hospitals from different insurers each with duplicated facilities like MRIs that barely get used.Every other first-world nation spends less per-capita on health care than the US does, and with objectively better results. And, of course, they get to sleep at night knowing that their health care isn;t tied to their employment, that if they get laid off they don;t have just 6 months of expensive COBRA coverage until their out of luck. They get to sleep knowing that everyone in their nation has access to health care, regardless of abilitiy to pay, just like they all have access to police and fire protection.And instead of trying to support a fiscally more responsible and ethically necessary single-payer plan, you instead lash out at someone who said he couldnt afford health care with assumptions pulled from nowhere but your own ass about his real ability to pay.

Apparently Johnny Q Shitstain here doesn't understand the concept of a progressive motherfucking income tax.A person making less than $20,000 a year doesn;t have to pay nearly anything in taxes...even if we add in a public health care plan.A person making $60,000 a year has to pay a lot more, and can afford it - $100 to this person means a lot less than it does to the guy making 20k.A person making $100,000 a year has to a pay a LOT more, for the same reason.Somehow this is okay when we talk about paying for the military, or public infrastructure, or police and fire protection, but not okay when it comes to health care, because...well, because Phage is a brainless hatfucker who doesn't think beyond what Ayn Rand told him in Atlas Shrugged.

More than that, they have every incentive to deny coverage regardless of how much it's needed. Premiums are all that matters, it's the entirety of their profit. Every time they pay for care, it subtracts from the bottom line.How messed up would it be if the fire department could make more profit by not putting out fires? That's the system we have right now for healthcare, and anyone who pretends otherwise is an idiot.

Check out Phage's account subtext - it now says "inactive member." Looks like the poor widdle Randroid baby ran away because we called him on his bullshit.

I've been there. Spent over a year on unemployment once. I was pretty conservative in my youth as well - to my great shame, I supported people and policies that I would today find utterly disgusting.The simple fact is that most people won;t even see an ethical problem until it's pointed out to them - and sometimes that means experiencing a hardship for yourself. Stories of "welfare queens" and other myths easily let people view the downtrodden as "leaches" on society. Popular books like Atlas Shrugged reinforce those beliefs. Since this allows people to continue on guilt-free without changing their minds, they do so. Only when you present a person with actual facts (and there will still be resistance, people are not rational by nature and don;t change their minds easily) will you get them to even notice that there's a problem with their beliefs.And then there are still a few sociopaths like Phage, who couldn't give a shit less about anyone else as long as they feel like they have theirs. Conservative fiscal policy has several glaring holes.1) It's not based on fact, it's based on emotional principles on what a person "deserves" and reactionary opposition to hints of "communism." They aren;t really concerned with actual per-capita costs, or they'd embrace universal healthcare with a single-payer plan like the Second Coming. They donl;t want any of their hard-earned money (or hard-inherited, or hard-invested, or whatever) being taxed to support some other guy, because that's "theft."2) It completely ignores the fact that letting people sink-or-swim causes a larger drain on society in the long run than helping to keep effective producers working. If a middle-class person loses their home, loses their car, etc, he can no longer effectively contribute to society. If we help him by publicly funding healthcare, helping to cover gaps in employment when layoffs happen, etc, we can lose less int eh long run as that individual can continue to contribute to the whole. The easier we make it to bounce back to "normal" employment, the smaller we make the "fall" when bad things like recessions or illnesses happen, the less we'll need to invest in the long run.3) It completely ignores morality, substituting ethics with obsessive greed, plain and simple. I earned my money, you can;t have any of it. The animated TV comedy Metalocalypse features a band that sometimes manages to make effective satire, and here are some of the lyrics to one of their songs, which I think sums up the Republican fiscal policy perfectly:

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I want to keep my money
And give away absolutely nothing
To the government who moderates my spending
and obliterates depending on what time of the year
brutality is near

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in the form of income tax
I'd rather take a fucking axe
to my face, blow up this place

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with you all in it, I'd do it in a minute

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If I could write off your murder
I'd save all of my receipts
because I'd rather you be dead
than lose a tiny shred of what I made this fiscal year

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I'd rather you be dead than ponder parting with my second home
I'd rather you be dead than consider not opening a restaurant

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I'd rather you be dead

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What makes you think that the tiny subset of the population that you actually meet are those most in need of assistance?What makes you think that you're at all a reasonable judge of who should or not receive aid?What makes you think that social programs "throw money" at people as opposed to actually providing assistance?What makes you think that your personal anecdotes, consisting of a small number of interactions with a tiny subset of the population, give you even remotely an idea of the real face of poverty, unemployment, welfare, etc in the United States? Why do you believe that people in general will choose to help the less fortunate if the choice is left to themselves? What makes you feel that individuals are better at making those decisions than government agencies? What makes you think that your small-scale individual charity, even if applied on a national level, provides better net utility to the country than a government agency? What makes you think that your single anecdote is in any way representative of the system as a whole? I live in a blue state. I had to fill out the paperwork and look for a job constantly when I was unemployed. If you've ever once lived on public assistance of any kind, you know that this is a crock. There's no such thing as a welfare queen, it's a myth. Unemployment barely provides enough money to live on - and if you lost a large enough income, it's often not enough to make ends meet with pre-existing mortgages and the like. You can;t live comfortably on unemployment - you can scrape by until you find a job. You have every incentive to get off your ass and find work - not the least being that if you're caught fraudulently claiming that you searched for work, you'll lose coverage, and you'll run out of benefits eventually anyway. In what way, specifically? Be precise. Give numbers. What is the actual harm caused, beyond a statement of emotional preference that amounts to nothing more substantive than "I think blue is a better color?"

It's all a Big Lie. Always has been. If you can convince the public to vehemently work against their own best interest...well, then you get America.It's the major flaw of Democracy. The opinion of the average Joe are worse than useless when discussing complicated issues like the financial sector. Middle class America on the average is not sufficiently competent to even recognize their own incompetence on issues like this.And yet the people we have advising Presidents and Congress are not on our side. It's like letting coal barons run the EPA! The people who are supposed to stand between the people and the harmful effects of capitalism unrestrained are on the side of the robber barons, and we have no champions.I don't understand financial markets nearly enough to comment on what specific regulations are or or not appropriate. But I can sure as hell see that we have a completely bass-ackwards set of incentives going on at the top levels. When the Fed and other entities that are supposed to help regulate American commerce and monetary policy are all run by the very investment bankers that those entities are intended to regulate, there is a problem.

Close, but not precise.What he's saying is that middle-class Americans spend a larger percentage of their income than wealthy people do. Part of that is because there are more of them, and so 1000 people will consume more food, will need more cars, etc.But the real point is that a person making 50,000 is likely to spend 90% of his income, circulating that money back into the economy.A person making 50,000,000 will not spend or invest 90% of his income. Sure, he'll buy some expensive houses, some cars, a yacht, and so on, and he'll invest a lot of his money so that he can increase his wealth without doing any work. But a large percentage of his money will not be recirculated - it will go into bank accounts and so on. While it's true that Americans in general need to save more, money saved is not money spent, and doesn;t continue to circulate.1000 middle-class Americans making 50k and spending 90% of their income will circulate far more money than a rich person making 50mil and spending only 60% of his income.Inheritance continues that trend. The wealthy horde large percentages of their money, and that money stagnates instead of circulating. That money will not be spent to buy a product from a company that employed an individual and paid him a salary which he then spends and continues the cycle. It's a break in the chain.

I'm sorry, but that's just not true. It might be your moral ideal, but it in no way is reflected in reality. It is not illegal to be a racist, nor is it illegal to teach one's children racist ideals. It's not illegal to teach one's children lies of any sort.Racism falls under freedom of speech. People are always allowed to believe and speak according to the dictates of their own conscience, even when those beliefs are demonstrably wrong, and even when those beliefs are harmful to society, so long as they do not actively encourage violence or other lawbreaking.We might find it extremely distasteful, but the harm done to society even by racism is overshadowed by the harm that would be done if we stripped the right of free speech - imagine a world without the freedom of speech where political power rested in the hands of (insert any faction opposed to your personal views here). We've seen societies like that. We don;t need a world with One Imperial Truth officially sanctioned by the government - the proper weapon against reprehensible beliefs and speech is more speech, not taking kids away from their parents and confirming some idiot's anti-government conspiracy theories.So yes, parents do have the right to raise little racists, or little Christians or Jews or Nazis or Republicans or Democrats or voodoo practitioners or Satanists or atheists or wiccans or just about anything else, regardless of how distasteful or ethically objectionable you or I or anyone else might find some of those beliefs. This isn't 1984, we don't have thought police.It's damned near impossible to avoid imprinting the parent's values onto children they raise anyway. That's just how the developmental process works.You can override parental rights when a parent commits real abuse, not simply teaching ideas that you disapprove of, no matter how strongly or how correctly you disapprove. To do otherwise serves to chill free speech for everyone.Very few forms of speech are not protected. You can't teach your kids to go out and commit murder, or to play with matches at gas stations. You can't yell "fire" in a crowded area that's not actually on fire.But you can tell your children that Santa Claus exists, or that they should worship Satan, or that (insert race here) aren't really people. And the reason is that, regardless of how badly that can harm the children, the alternative is worse.

Sorry Crash, but I'll need evidence here to support your assertion. Racism, while despicable, has long been upheld as a free speech matter, and it's simply not possible to prevent children from being influenced by their parents. If KKK members have children who are not immediately scooped up by CPS, I don't see how your assertion can be true. And the UCLA would have an absolute field day with the free speech violation inherent in stealing someone's children for having an unpleasant set of beliefs.You'd have to be raising the children with specific violent overtones, actively encouraging violence as opposed to "merely" spreading racist views. You keep using that word, abuse. I don;t think it means what you think it means.The way you're using it, treating "brainwashing" as real abuse, it applies far too universally. Childhood development makes normal childhood education from parents indistinguishable from brainwashing - they believe anything their parents tell them and actively seek to please their parents instinctually. The only differentiating factor between "brainwashing" and normal childhood learning would be down to the subjective acceptability of the beliefs being passed on - which treads very clearly into free speech. Raising a child in any religious environment is akin to "brainwashing," yet the courts certainly don't view that as abuse. ...which means they have the right to raise their children to be racist, since one immediately proceeds to the other without further action. If you grow up with a racist daddy, you're very likely to grow up racist yourself. True and false. Parents do have the right to limit their children's contact with the outside world. See home schooling. I agre it's most often not a good idea and harms the child, but plainly they have the right to do it anyway - "rights" are not limited to expressions of those rights that you or I would personally agree with. Curiously, religious people have the right to do exactly that with regard to their religious indoctrinations; what differenciates religious speech from racist speech other than the specific message? If parents can send their kids to Jesus Camp and teach them that Harry Potter is the devil and that Muslims are evil and that the outside world is sinful and wicked and home school them away from the evil public school system, and they can do all of this perfectly legally, how is it that you believe that a family performing the exact same actions but with a more specific racists message as opposed to a theocratic message would not be protected? Not all racists are violent, crash. Most, even, are not, which is why we haven't actually had race wars and only a tiny minority of racists are currently in prison.Please present some evidence that racist parents are not allowed to raise racist children. You'll need specific legislation or court decisions (that weren't later overturned by higher courts) showing that membership in a known hate group or the passing of racist views onto a child is grounds for termination of parental rights even in the absence of incitement to commit violence or other actual crimes (since we both agree that incitement to commit violence is a crime). Edited by Rahvin, : No reason given.

Canada is a completely different country, crash, with hate crime laws vastly stronger than those in teh US. In the US, Fred Phelps can keep spewing his verbal feces legally; in Canada, he would be arrested for his hate speech.Canada is irrelevant if we're talking about the United States. I was.Thankfully, you provided other examples with greater relevance. This was a custody case between two divorced parents. This was not a matter of stripping parenting rights over racism from the parent. Custody battles in court follow the judge's determination of "the best interest of the child," which literally means (and has meant in the past) that custody can be determined on the basis of what the judge perceives to be a harmful religious belief. The only reason this case even came up was because the mother didn't like the racism, sparking the custody dispute. The mother was granted custody because the judge determined that arrangement to be "in the best interest of the child." The mother did not approve of the father's beliefs. Ergo, she used her rights as the custodial parent to get him to stop exposing the children to the beliefs she disapproved of.It's similar to if a divorced couple were of different religions. Say one is a Satanist (perfectly legal, but stigmatized) and one is a converted Catholic. The Catholic parent has full custody, and objects that the Satanic parent brings the children to Black Mass when he has visitation. The Catholic parent brings the matter before a family court. The court would then very likely issue an order against the Satanic parent, saying that the children are no longer to be made to attend the Satanic services due to the emotional stress of both parents trying to give them directly opposing views, and the judgment would by default be in favor of the parent with custody. It's not a matter of freedom of religion, it's not a matter of free speech, it's a matter of working out the parental rights in the complex situation of divorced parents and shared custody.It's not at all the same as CPS swooping down and taking your kids away because you used racial epithets. ...crash, did you even read the details?From the HuffPo article on the same story:

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The court found that both parents were themselves victims of childhood abuse and said neither "have received adequate treatment for their serious psychological conditions."

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Heath Campbell, 37, cannot read and Deborah Campbell dropped out of high school before finishing the 10th grade, according to court records.

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In its ruling, the panel found the parents "recklessly created a risk of serious injury to their children by failing to protect the children from harm and failing to acknowledge and treat their disabilities."

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The parents were both seriously physically and mentally disabled. The father threatened the life of the mother and took action to incite the children to violence:

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"Hes thrend to have me killed or kill me himself hes alread tried it a few times. Im afread that he might hurt my children if they are keeped in his care. He teaches my son how to kill someone at the age of 3," the letter read in part.

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The children were taken on those grounds, not on the grounds of any racism. Which defeats your own point, crash. If racist "brainwashing" is cause for the termination of parental rights, the mother would not have retained her rights either. The kids would have been removed from both parents, not only the physically abusive father. Since the courts were clearly aware of the mother's racism and that the girls would continue to sing in their (disgusting) performances, and since the court did not remove the mother's parental rights, don't you think that's a pretty clear sign that hate speech and neo-Nazi indoctrination were not in fact grounds to do so?I don;t have time to go through the rest right now, crash, but based on the above...let's just say you haven't made me change my mind.

Crash, that's the most useless definition ever."What makes some things flammable, and other things not?""THat which causes fire would be flammable; that which does not cause fire is not flammable."What defines "harm," crash? Without that, the rest of your statement is meaningless.