Disgusted with Trump administration - Part I

• BoatShoes

  queencitybuckeye;1843722 wrote:Why should anyone be forced to? I'm sympathetic, but how does that justify coercion?

  Jonathan Gruber compares it to eliminating descrimination in other markets.
  
  For example, the Civil Rights Act imposes coercion. Why should hotel owners be forced to accommodate black people? The theory is that this coercion ultimately results in greater liberty as black folks were not in effect able to secure and enjoy the blessings of liberty.
  
  In insurance markets, prior to the ACA the argument was that millions didnt really enjoy the blessings of liberty.
  
  Forcing hotels to accommodate blacks will increase demand for hotel rooms without an increase in supply and theoretically raise prices for whites which will harm whites.
  
  Allowing sick people into the insurance market by requiring guaranteed issue will raise prices for the healthier people that were already in.
  
  But access to the market for all without unjust discrimination may make us all more free in the aggreggate?
• gut

  ptown_trojans_1;1843720 wrote: If I am an insurance company, why the hell would I want to cover someone who smokes, has a history of cancer in the family, in a coal mining area, and barely makes any money?.

  You can insure just about anything if you agree on the right price. It's quite simple - the insurance company will insure you if the expected payouts and administration costs equal the expected premiums collected. But if you have an 80% chance of $250k+ in medical costs, you're probably rolling the dice and not paying $200k in premiums.
  
  I realize that doesn't sound like an evil, greedy corporatist scheme, but it's how the world actually works.
• gut

  BoatShoes;1843949 wrote: But access to the market for all without unjust discrimination may make us all more free in the aggreggate?

  Sure, because bigger government and higher taxes is always an indicator of greater freedom.
• BoatShoes

  gut;1843955 wrote:Sure, because bigger government and higher taxes is always an indicator of greater freedom.

  Do you think black folks for the most part felt more free after the Civil Rights Act? Do you think a cancer survivor feels more free when trying to buy individual health insurance now as opposed to before the ACA?
  
  Both of these indeed involve coercion on other market players. The pursuit of greater and more robust liberty through some degrees of coercion is the telos of Republican liberal democracy and the balance that gets it done right is hard to do - as the ACA readily shows.
• gut

  BoatShoes;1844057 wrote: Both of these indeed involve coercion on other market players. The pursuit of greater and more robust liberty through some degrees of coercion is the telos of Republican liberal democracy and the balance that gets it done right is hard to do - as the ACA readily shows.

  The ACA is a complete joke. You can't screen for pre-existing conditions. 18-month waiting period if insurance has lapsed. All the others - HEY! you're eligible for Medicaid.
  
  Done. Three sentences vs. 2000 pages and a better outcome for everyone.
  
  I didn't argue for no govt. That is the classic strawman rebuttal. I said big govt and big debt are highly correlated with slower growth, fewer jobs and lower wages (just as REAL economics would predict). That is a FACT. One that you can't bring yourself to admit because, at your core, you're a socialist.
• bigorangebuck22

  ptown_trojans_1;1843664 wrote:We'll see what happens when the vote happens, or doesn't.
  Either way, to think that the R's could do this fast is laughable.
  There is a reason it Obamacare took so long, cause it is complicated and messy.
  
  Also, I've been away for a few days.
  I noticed the news that Ivanka will have an office in the West Wing. Just a question, we all cool with that?
  I would think that if Chelsea would have an office in Hillary's West Wing, there would be outrage.

  Will Barron get an office and a paid staff over the summer, tasked with finding ways to Make Grade School Great Again?
• O-Trap

  

  like_that;1842999 wrote:lol, nobody is going to read this shit.

  I am. More people should get their news from the actual documents anyway; wouldn't you agree?
  

  BoatShoes;1843691 wrote:Said unironically as his party's leaders desperstely try to pass Obamacare lite.

  Technically, it isn't an either/or situation. I ultimately agree with his statement, but I largely agree with yours as well.
  

  ptown_trojans_1;1843714 wrote:ACA is full of problems, but prices were increasing before it was implemented...

  True, but it did expedite the increases, which really shouldn't come as a surprise, since we were adding people to the pool receiving benefits without necessarily maintaining the ability to pay for it at the individual level to the same degree.
  
  That, of course, also doesn't take into account the additional oversight of the program itself or the infrastructure, like the dumpster fire referred to as HealthCare.gov which, on the low side of estimates, still cost close to nine figures (which is obscene, even for a site that needs to handle that level of security, storage, and bandwidth).
  
  I'm certainly not blaming all the price increases on the additional governmental involvement, but it does seem like it gave the increases a booster shot.
  

  ptown_trojans_1;1843718 wrote:Again, ACA sucks, but just removing it will not stop the rise of health insurance. It's a little more complicated than just saying repeal and everything will be fine! Free market!

  That's certainly fair. The health insurance market ... hell, MOST major markets ... have not qualified as ACTUAL laissez-faire market since before I was born.
  

  ptown_trojans_1;1843720 wrote:If I am an insurance company, why the hell would I want to cover someone who smokes, has a history of cancer in the family, in a coal mining area, and barely makes any money? Why would I take that risk? I would not want to cover them, or if I am going to, set the deductible so high it makes it not worth it.

  Why, indeed? They're terribly expensive to insure, and as cold as it sounds, companies and organizations don't exist for the purpose of operating at a loss, which I hardly think makes them greedy or terrible. Every organization wants to work at AT LEAST a breakeven (lumping non-profits in here, as they don't want to operate at a loss, either).
  
  I WOULD submit, however, that problems like these are the sorts of things that many entrepreneurs try to tackle in innovative ways so as to minimize the collective burden while maximizing effectiveness. But with something even like the ACA, you sort of remove the incentive to do so, or at the very least, you create competition that can essentially keep itself afloat without really having to bend to the desires for prices, efficiencies, or service levels expressed by the citizenry in the market, really at any level (the USPS or the DMV/BMV, for example).
  

  ptown_trojans_1;1843724 wrote:Yeah, that's the hard part to square. How do you ensure that people can pay for healthcare, yet balance individual freedom?
  I don't know the answer, but do know the ACA and the ACHA do not even come close to addressing the core problem. Also, the free market will not address it.

  Ultimately, I can't see a way to guarantee it, but I do think that an actual free market comes closest.
  
  There's less overhead cost if federal bureaucrats don't need to be employed to monitor or regulate it, so that would lower the cost to the citizenry as a whole.
  
  There would be a lower cost of entry into that market to compete if there is no need to pay for licenses or permissions.
  
  If law doesn't mandate that the service is used by the citizenry, it diminishes the ability to collude, since the market itself can shrink more easily based on the desires of the people in the market to either pay for service or refrain from doing so.
  
  The lower overhead allows for attempts to use price as competitive leverage.
  
  Obviously, price isn't the only thing that matters in a niche (or car companies like Mercedes would be out of business), but providers would have fewer restraints in their attempts to leverage different parts of their services and/or payment structures to maximize their competitiveness in the market while still remaining as profitable as possible.
  
  Sure, you might have a couple companies try to buy up the market and collude to raise prices, but with the lower cost of market entry and smaller requirements for conforming to regulatory standards, any entrepreneurially-minded individual would see that as an opening in that space. While one might point to the larger players' ability to temporarily drop prices and take the loss to put the small guy out of business, if it's a big enough market, they'd likely end up having to do it constantly, which isn't good for shareholders.
  

  BoatShoes;1844057 wrote:Do you think black folks for the most part felt more free after the Civil Rights Act? Do you think a cancer survivor feels more free when trying to buy individual health insurance now as opposed to before the ACA?
  
  Both of these indeed involve coercion on other market players. The pursuit of greater and more robust liberty through some degrees of coercion is the telos of Republican liberal democracy and the balance that gets it done right is hard to do - as the ACA readily shows.

  I would submit that they might have felt freer than before, but no, I don't think they would have seen themselves as "free." I would contend that many could make a good case that they, as minorities, are still not.
  
  However, the problem with this link being used between "freedom" and coercion is that it only helps itself to one side of coercion.
  
  Prior to much of the Civil Rights reform, there was still equitable coercion. It was just in the opposite direction. Business owners could be jailed and heavily fined for running a desegregated business. That is ALSO coercion.
  
  So, since there was coercion in regard to racial consideration within businesses both before and after the Civil Rights movement, I would contend that it wasn't "coercion" that brought about the greater presence of freedom. Rather, it was merely a change of the wind within the already coercive system.
  
  If the market was permitted to operate under more of a "freedom of association" model, it would be up to the business owners whether or not they wanted segregation within their business. And if the general societal trend was for more racial equality (which I'd argue was necessary for the success of the Civil Rights movement anyway), it would hurt those wishing to segregate their businesses and help those interested in running desegregated businesses. You might have ended up arriving at a better level of equality more quickly, because the viability of a desegregated business would have increased more and more anyway with the dominant consciousness trending that way. Nobody would have had to wait for a change in the law.
  
  Ultimately, the problem with attempts like this through coercion is that it doesn't guarantee that the wind doesn't one day change back. If we live under the auspice that coercion is the best means for getting everyone to play nicely, you have to trust that whoever has the clout to adjust it will be benevolent enough to do so in the best interest of the people, instead of letting the people decide who they want to associate with for themselves.
  

  gut;1844143 wrote:I didn't argue for no govt. That is the classic strawman rebuttal. I said big govt and big debt are highly correlated with slower growth, fewer jobs and lower wages (just as REAL economics would predict). That is a FACT.

  One that, quite frankly, is only logical. If you take an industry and add a regulatory body, comprised of paid employees and needs for initial and ongoing infrastructure, that industry is going to cost more as a whole, regardless of how it is paid for or who is paying for it. It will simply be more expensive, because you're adding costs that don't make up for themselves in efficiencies.
• like_that

  

  O-Trap;1844691 wrote:I am. More people should get their news from the actual documents anyway; wouldn't you agree?
  
  

  Well considering how our media doesn't do their jobs, sure. My point is unless you are coming from experience most people are not going to have time to read thru everything to find the "meat" of the document. I read it, because I know how weed thru the bullshit on those documents. I am not sure if you have experience, but if not I am sure you are in the extreme minority of people who actually read it. Hell, the mass majority of the people have no idea where to find those documents.
• O-Trap

  

  like_that;1844799 wrote:Well considering how our media doesn't do their jobs, sure. My point is unless you are coming from experience most people are not going to have time to read thru everything to find the "meat" of the document. I read it, because I know how weed thru the bullshit on those documents. I am not sure if you have experience, but if not I am sure you are in the extreme minority of people who actually read it. Hell, the mass majority of the people have no idea where to find those documents.

  I'm not versed in politics, so I end up reading through a lot of the nonsense in docs like that, but I read enough legal speak in contracts to get through stuff like that.
• gut

  O-Trap;1844802 wrote:I'm not versed in politics, so I end up reading through a lot of the nonsense in docs like that, but I read enough legal speak in contracts to get through stuff like that.

  Something about Like That's response got me thinking - yeah, we really can't assume someone doesn't work for the govt.
  
  So I looked it up, and it's beyond sad - and shocking.....about 1 in 7 people (22M) work for government (federal, state and local). AND that doesn't even include teachers, police, firefighters and other civil servants. Adding those people puts you up over 40M.
  
  In other words, roughly 112.5M employed by the private sector have to support 40M living off the taxpayer, plus all those other entitlements and redistribution schemes!
• QuakerOats

  And I get hammered for saying we could whack government by 25% and no one would even notice.
• SportsAndLady

  

  So help me out here, can the government track our ISP and browsing history or what? How fucking corrupt are these POS politicians that they actually voted on allowing the government to be able to look at the American people's internet history in order to sell that information to different companies? And to make it worse, many of them received "political contributions" for that vote. Aka, bribes.
• Automatik

  

  Drain the swamp!
• justincredible

  

  SportsAndLady;1844923 wrote:So help me out here, can the government track our ISP and browsing history or what? How fucking corrupt are these POS politicians that they actually voted on allowing the government to be able to look at the American people's internet history in order to sell that information to different companies? And to make it worse, many of them received "political contributions" for that vote. Aka, bribes.

  Basically, Republicans really screwed up and gave the media a ton to run with, but it's not as bad as they are making it out to be. Like most things.
  
  https://www.facebook.com/UnbiasedAmerica/posts/617226731796659?match=dW5iaWFzZWQgYW1lcmljYQ%3D%3D
• fish82

  

  justincredible;1844926 wrote:Basically, Republicans really screwed up and gave the media a ton to run with, but it's not as bad as they are making it out to be. Like most things.
  
  https://www.facebook.com/UnbiasedAmerica/posts/617226731796659?match=dW5iaWFzZWQgYW1lcmljYQ%3D%3D

  Agreed. From a PR perspective it was a dumb move, but the hysteria over it is laughable.
• gut

  fish82;1844929 wrote:Agreed. From a PR perspective it was a dumb move, but the hysteria over it is laughable.

  It's a wet-dream for tech sites - they get to do their two favorite things: bash Trump, bash ISP's (Net Neutrality DERP!!!!!)
• like_that

  

  justincredible;1844926 wrote:Basically, Republicans really screwed up and gave the media a ton to run with, but it's not as bad as they are making it out to be. Like most things.
  
  https://www.facebook.com/UnbiasedAmerica/posts/617226731796659?match=dW5iaWFzZWQgYW1lcmljYQ%3D%3D

  I read this yesterday, good shit.
• justincredible

  

  THE SKY IS FALLING...
  
  https://www.engadget.com/2017/03/31/eff-verizon-will-install-spyware-on-all-its-android-phones/
  
  Oh, wait, read the updates at the end.
• O-Trap

  

  SportsAndLady;1844923 wrote:So help me out here, can the government track our ISP and browsing history or what? How fucking corrupt are these POS politicians that they actually voted on allowing the government to be able to look at the American people's internet history in order to sell that information to different companies? And to make it worse, many of them received "political contributions" for that vote. Aka, bribes.

  The government has been able to track IPs and some browsing histories for a long time (whether or not it's legal is another matter, but this bill didn't really change that).
  
  This bill allows the ISPs, themselves, to sell the browsing data.
  
  Think of it like a more pervasive and completely digital version of Publisher's Clearinghouse, which makes essentially ALL its money selling data on people who subscribe to publications through them.
  
  There are also store rewards programs who do it as well.
  
  ISPs are basically getting into the action. Their business model affords them access to TONS of data, and this allows them to make some quick coin from it.
  
  It isn't that hard to get around something like this, for the record. A secure VPN (I use HideMyAss, which is like $7 a month) and the Tor browser will essentially make all of your browsing history invisible to your ISP. The "Internet noise" sites and browser extensions don't work nearly as well as people think they do, but relaying through secure proxies will.
  
  For the record, there are things that will make it easier to track you even with the above, so if you really want to keep your browsing history private, but you also want to use Facebook, use one browser for all the services you use that show your identity (social media, online banking, etc.) and the Tor browser for the rest.
• justincredible

  

  Trump seems to have officially declared war on Justin Amash, one of the few truly principled members of congress because he helped defeat the garbage Ryan/Trumpcare bill. So much for draining the swamp.
• CenterBHSFan

  

  justincredible;1845254 wrote:Trump seems to have officially declared war on Justin Amash, one of the few truly principled members of congress because he helped defeat the garbage Ryan/Trumpcare bill. So much for draining the swamp.

  Not sticking up for Trump, but, the Freedom Caucus has had the same amount of time as every other republican/caucus to come up with a decent and reasonable plan. They did not.
  
  The republicans are a friggen joke.
• ppaw1999

  CenterBHSFan;1845277 wrote:Not sticking up for Trump, but, the Freedom Caucus has had the same amount of time as every other republican/caucus to come up with a decent and reasonable plan. They did not.
  
  The republicans are a friggen joke.

  http://www.the-daily-record.com/opinion/2017/04/02/commentary-republican-ability-to-govern-called-into-question
  
  Gridlock +1
• sleeper

  

  Travel Ban? Nope.
  Travel Ban Part 2? Nope.
  Healthcare reform? Failed.
  Flynn? Traitor.
  Bannon? Demoted.
  Nunes? Demoted.
  FBI? Investigating.
  Approval rating? 37%
  SCOTUS appointment? Nope.
  Hillary in Jail? Nope.
  Mexico paying for wall? Nope.
  
  #winning
• fish82

  

  Weeper? Still mad.
  
  Welcome back.
• Automatik

  

  sleeper;1846135 wrote:Travel Ban? Nope.
  Travel Ban Part 2? Nope.
  Healthcare reform? Failed.
  Flynn? Traitor.
  Bannon? Demoted.
  Nunes? Demoted.
  FBI? Investigating.
  Approval rating? 37%
  SCOTUS appointment? Nope.
  Hillary in Jail? Nope.
  Mexico paying for wall? Nope.
  
  #winning

  And his supporters still slurping LOL