US government Shutdown

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Dominus Atheos
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Re: US government Shutdown

Post by Dominus Atheos »

amigocabal wrote:
Dominus Atheos wrote:Oh, I see what amigocabal misunderstood. When I said "keep people out" I meant that they put up barricades like they did at the WWII memorial.

Sure the barricades may not keep determined people out (the WWII vets just pushed them aside), but that is literally the best they can do. There are no security guards on duty, even to enforce the barricades.
So the question is, what stops the vandalism when those monuments are open?
Now I'm beginning to think you may just be mentally challenged. I'll write in a big font so it's easier for you to read.

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AniThyng
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Re: US government Shutdown

Post by AniThyng »

Dominus Atheos wrote:
amigocabal wrote:
Dominus Atheos wrote:Oh, I see what amigocabal misunderstood. When I said "keep people out" I meant that they put up barricades like they did at the WWII memorial.

Sure the barricades may not keep determined people out (the WWII vets just pushed them aside), but that is literally the best they can do. There are no security guards on duty, even to enforce the barricades.
So the question is, what stops the vandalism when those monuments are open?
Now I'm beginning to think you may just be mentally challenged. I'll write in a big font so it's easier for you to read.

SECURITY GUARDS
Uh, I've read that there are in fact security guards enforcing the barricades.
I do know how to spell
AniThyng is merely the name I gave to what became my favourite Baldur's Gate II mage character :P
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Broomstick
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Re: US government Shutdown

Post by Broomstick »

amigocabal wrote:Why can not state governments pick up the health care tab?
They can but most of them have not done so.
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Terralthra
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Re: US government Shutdown

Post by Terralthra »

amigocabal wrote:
Covenant wrote: Healthcare is a HUGE cost for the government, but its also a HUGE cost for businesses and for individuals. Healthcare is MASSIVELY EXPENSIVE. We can't just wave our hands and make it go away. Making it "not the government's business" does not make it go away and does not make it less of a national concern that WILL and DOES impact things like our national efficiency and our attractiveness to the outside world, including our ability to apply both soft and hard power in geopolitical fights. Republicans have a singular lack of vision, and do not see the nation as an organic whole with systems that interrelate. They see them as individual components to be chopped up. Or more terrifyingly maybe they understand it, don't care, and are happy to decrease America's economic, political, and scientific place in the world so that states can have more control over their populations without federal oversight.

Anyway, back to healthcare. It sucks, it's expensive, and someone has to pay it. Republicans don't want to make businesses pay it, the way they used to, because it is too much of a burden. And they don't want to have to help other people pay for healthcare themselves, so they don't want the Government to do it either, especially not with taxes from those who are so wealthy they can afford good healthcare already and thus benefit from the economic stability the system provides. That means they want individuals to pay these HUGE COSTS themselves, which is reasonable if not incredibly inefficient, if you assume they can.
I have one question.

Why can not state governments pick up the health care tab?

And before you write that Republicans are keeping states from paying for health care, I should remind you that neither Hawaii, Massachusetts, nor West Virginia have enough Republicans in government to stop that.
Hawaii has some of the best health care in the nation, among other things, by requiring employers cover employees working over 20 hours a week (as opposed to federal law's 30-hour minimum), expanded Medicaid/Medicare, and further subsidies. Their insured rate is well over 90%.

Massachusetts has the equivalent of the ACA already; it served as the initial blueprint for the ACA.

I don't know much about WV, but I do know it has gone Republican in the past three Presidential elections. So far as I know, most of the democrats in state office would be blue dogs (or Republicans) by California or New York standards.

As for the why the federal government should mandate it instead of the states? Bigger pool = more powerful negotiation = lower costs.
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Covenant
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Re: US government Shutdown

Post by Covenant »

amigocabal wrote:Why can not state governments pick up the health care tab?
Well, they--
Broomstick wrote:They can but most of them have not done so.
--dammit! Broomstick and I are just on the same wavelength today.

They can, and for some services they may do an admirable job, but it isn't ideal. Before I go any further I'll state I would support a single payer plan administrated by state agencies. I'm not insane here, I'm not a fan of states-rights perspectives but I do not think a state is not a functionally incompetent organization always and forever.

My guess as for why this is usually a terrible option, which is mostly uneducated except from the debates I heard about a federal program, is that this is really the most cost effective when you get to negotiate for the hugest possible size at once. That's why business healthcare plans were better and cost less than family plans, which are in turn better than individual plans. If you were in charge of a business and had to insure your 10 workers, you'd want to negotiate for them all under a corporate plan, not ten individual plans, because the group plan is way cheaper. The government wants to do it the same way. By allowing businesses to ignore the health of their employees we're giving them added slack, which is fine, so long as that horribly huge burden doesn't fall to the people. We're designing a system here, afterall. Think of it like a game. Obviously the best choice is the one that creates the least efficiency. Governments may be inefficient but they're way more efficient than millions upon millions of individual and family plans.

So if you care about a healthy workforce, a healthy economy, and a superior standard of living that also allows more of that money to be spent on other industries than healthcare and insurance, you're going to want to have a federal system more than any other system. That's why I find the Republican opposition so baffling, it's not like the Bible says Thou Shalt Not Suffer The Poor To Live Better or anything. It's not even good for businesses for employees to lose work-days and for them to have to handle leave and so forth. The situation as it is just ends up bad for everyone.

So really:

Everyone in America getting individual plans is bad while everyone getting a group plan together is good. Splitting up the healthcare 50 ways, and having it not even be an even 50 ways, sounds like a worse idea than doing it federally. More waste, no more gain, and a less flexible standard for health care.

Having a single standard nation-wide would be a much easier way to handle it too. Giving states control over healthcare isn't automatically evil, but I don't trust states to make decisions in the best interests of individual health when it comes to women's health in specific.

I'm also concerned that the states that require the most federal financial assistance, which are often the red states, would even be less able to fund these programs than they are able to fund their current ones, requiring more federal aid anyway. So it stops being a program we all pay into and all take out of and being a program that Blue States pay for and the Red States make the Blue States pay their bills too. Which, on a state level and federal level, is highly dysfunctional.

If someone showed me evidence I was wrong then I'd give both ideas equal support. I just don't support throwing the cost onto individuals, which is the least cost effective system and creates the highest degree of waste. The only thing it does do is isolate businesses from those costs (at a detriment to their workers) and achieve an ideological aim.
amigocabal wrote:And before you write that Republicans are keeping states from paying for health care, I should remind you that neither Hawaii, Massachusetts, nor West Virginia have enough Republicans in government to stop that.
Well, the oft-snarked upon mention of "Romneycare" shows that it's not impossible for a Republican (moderate or not) to understand the value of healthcare to their constituents. I think the Republicans, by and large, are just making a bad decision based off bad calculations on this issue and not that they're ideologically opposed to the idea of poor people being healthy. I'm not trying to jab them here, I just don't think the states really can afford to pay for it. They also can't afford to pay for their own military or social security either though. We do that at a federal level because the scale makes it more cost effective, not less.
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Broomstick
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Re: US government Shutdown

Post by Broomstick »

For the past few years my spouse and I have been benefiting from the Healthy Indiana Plan, a subsidized health insurance that originated under the Republican governor Mitch Daniels and continued by his successor Mike Pence. That is additional proof that Republicans and Red States CAN subsidize healthcare for their citizens. As I said, they can but most choose not to do so.

As an additional note, it's a good rule of thumb that the larger the pool of insured people the greater the risk is spread out and the lower the cost is per covered person. Under this rule, a pool of the entire population of the US, which is nearing half a billion, is always going to be more cost-efficient than any state-level pool. It's not that a state-level pool isn't sufficiently large to be viable - many nations in Europe demonstrate you don't need 100 million in the pool to have your UHC system work - it's just that a larger pool is arguably better by many measures.
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Now I did a job. I got nothing but trouble since I did it, not to mention more than a few unkind words as regard to my character so let me make this abundantly clear. I do the job. And then I get paid.- Malcolm Reynolds, Captain of Serenity, which sums up my feelings regarding the lawsuit discussed here.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. - John F. Kennedy

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Irbis
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Re: US government Shutdown

Post by Irbis »

energiewende wrote:The government could just hand those attractions to non-profit charitable trusts. I'm sure the Statue of Liberty is self-funding. At the very least, ticket sales could pay the day-to-day costs while government grants could pay for major work.

This seems to be deliberate attempt to inconvenience random people so that they take a more negative view of the shut-down.
:roll:

Charitable trusts? Guess what, idiot, once every few years in USA some historically significant ship or other artefact pops up for sale as it is stricken from government storage. Usual result? Someone trying to take over it and failing, due to lack of money, even if offered for scrap price. Because it turns out when you wring money out of economy to hand it to the rich only a whim of rich guy (most of which aren't interested in history) can generate enough money even at rock bottom price.

And that is just money for purchase and temporary securing, never mind long term maintenance, of relatively small objects. And you are proposing for these funds to take over far bigger and more expensive stuff with a lot more needs. Where the money is going to come from, you imbecile? Someone will dig it out on the Moon? :roll:

Even your Statue of Liberty example was idiotic, last time I checked serious maintenance and repairs was done by specialized craftsmen team from France by hand. Gee, it must have come cheap, doesn't it?

Why, yes, it turns out that when someone doesn't pay for continued maintenance item usage stops being convenient, are such routine stuff as operating costs non-existent in Libertard la-la land?
amigocabal wrote:I have one question.

Why can not state governments pick up the health care tab?
Because A) healthcare is more effective the more people are insured and more importantly B) quite a lot of states (red ones) are economic shitholes with net population loss being finances by blue coast states. The poorest states are ones needing healthcare the most, while being least able to finance it, so why not go to federal level? It's both more efficient and causes less money to be lost to private money-counters.
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Re: US government Shutdown

Post by Simon_Jester »

Mr Bean wrote:
Simon_Jester wrote:The point is, there is NO security, so the NPS puts up enough tape and signs to say "nobody is allowed in here." That way, anyone who does go in is a priori trespassing, which makes it a lot easier to prosecute them after the fact than if you had to actually monitor their activities inside.

Also, it's in a real sense the best gesture they can make if they have zero people on staff who are getting paid to man the facility: put up a sign saying "we're closed," and while it may not actually deter vandals, it's better than nothing.
Simon let me put this simply
Its dead easy to do millions of dollars in damages in most monuments in just a few minutes. Don't need anything more fancy than a hammer and a good arm. To destructive? I could do a few hundred thousand with just one spray can.

And that's not counting if the weather permits the possibility of burning down national parks.
This stuff is fragile.
Yes. And "sorry, we're closed" is a pathetic deterrent. But it's about all the Park Service can really do at a time when officially it's not allowed to pay anyone to keep an eye on things.

This is probably not the only valuable government property being left unguarded or underguarded.
amigocabal wrote:So the question is, what stops the vandalism when those monuments are open?
If nothing else, greater risk of Park Service spotting what you've done and calling the police- which is a significant threat in its own right to certain types of troublemakers. A determined person could probably damage the monuments any time they please, but whatever good it does to have anyone in the vicinity on staff and responsible, is not being done right now.
amigocabal wrote:Why can not state governments pick up the health care tab?

And before you write that Republicans are keeping states from paying for health care, I should remind you that neither Hawaii, Massachusetts, nor West Virginia have enough Republicans in government to stop that.
Some do, most can't or won't. Now, if you think states' rights is more important than solving a massive raging out of control health-costs issue, that won't stop you from asking the question again. But that circles back to the fundamental point- that the Democrats are trying to solve a problem here, while their opposition plays rhetorical and ideological games to justify not solving the problem.
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Thanas
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Re: US government Shutdown

Post by Thanas »

Here is another reason why CRs cannot be allowed to be passed piece by piece - because if you fund anything the right wants funded, then you effectively passed a budget tailored by the right. No way would they (or should they, from the view of their ideology) then engage in constructive talks.
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Irbis
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Re: US government Shutdown

Post by Irbis »

Covenant wrote:That's why I find the Republican opposition so baffling, it's not like the Bible says Thou Shalt Not Suffer The Poor To Live Better or anything. It's not even good for businesses for employees to lose work-days and for them to have to handle leave and so forth. The situation as it is just ends up bad for everyone.
As someone pointed out in talk with me - Republithugs ever since Reagan have one commandment, 'state is bad, private is good'. What if Obamacare works? What if people start liking it?

Why, Democrats will gain very powerful weapon in example visible to everyone that national system can be better one than private network of profiting bloodsuckers. What then? What Republicans and other la-la land Libertarians fall back to? They have nothing, just one worn out phrase, going back to old racism and religious fundamentalism won't give them any more votes. Even their other bastions, like gun control and education written by states might start to crumble once fundament that protected them has rotted.

That's why Republithugs and big businesses tied to them fear it - it's quite literally threat to base of their existence that can spell their end or at least need to completely reinvent themselves. They need to keep the public ignorant. That's why we have all the attempts to water it down (so it isn't as powerful example) and to push it back more and more, so it can't start working well before next presidential term.
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Re: US government Shutdown

Post by Grumman »

Irbis wrote:As someone pointed out in talk with me - Republithugs ever since Reagan have one commandment, 'state is bad, private is good'. What if Obamacare works? What if people start liking it?

Why, Democrats will gain very powerful weapon in example visible to everyone that national system can be better one than private network of profiting bloodsuckers.
How do you figure that? How does forcing people to do business with said profiteering bloodsuckers and people coming to appreciate that state of affairs convince them that the alternative is better?
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Re: US government Shutdown

Post by amigocabal »

Terralthra wrote:
amigocabal wrote:
Covenant wrote: Healthcare is a HUGE cost for the government, but its also a HUGE cost for businesses and for individuals. Healthcare is MASSIVELY EXPENSIVE. We can't just wave our hands and make it go away. Making it "not the government's business" does not make it go away and does not make it less of a national concern that WILL and DOES impact things like our national efficiency and our attractiveness to the outside world, including our ability to apply both soft and hard power in geopolitical fights. Republicans have a singular lack of vision, and do not see the nation as an organic whole with systems that interrelate. They see them as individual components to be chopped up. Or more terrifyingly maybe they understand it, don't care, and are happy to decrease America's economic, political, and scientific place in the world so that states can have more control over their populations without federal oversight.

Anyway, back to healthcare. It sucks, it's expensive, and someone has to pay it. Republicans don't want to make businesses pay it, the way they used to, because it is too much of a burden. And they don't want to have to help other people pay for healthcare themselves, so they don't want the Government to do it either, especially not with taxes from those who are so wealthy they can afford good healthcare already and thus benefit from the economic stability the system provides. That means they want individuals to pay these HUGE COSTS themselves, which is reasonable if not incredibly inefficient, if you assume they can.
I have one question.

Why can not state governments pick up the health care tab?

And before you write that Republicans are keeping states from paying for health care, I should remind you that neither Hawaii, Massachusetts, nor West Virginia have enough Republicans in government to stop that.
Hawaii has some of the best health care in the nation, among other things, by requiring employers cover employees working over 20 hours a week (as opposed to federal law's 30-hour minimum), expanded Medicaid/Medicare, and further subsidies. Their insured rate is well over 90%.

Massachusetts has the equivalent of the ACA already; it served as the initial blueprint for the ACA.

I don't know much about WV, but I do know it has gone Republican in the past three Presidential elections. So far as I know, most of the democrats in state office would be blue dogs (or Republicans) by California or New York standards.

As for the why the federal government should mandate it instead of the states? Bigger pool = more powerful negotiation = lower costs.
So the United Nations would be even better for providing health care, then.
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Covenant
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Re: US government Shutdown

Post by Covenant »

amigocabal wrote:So the United Nations would be even better for providing health care, then.
That's dog-whistle language for a New World Order Anti-Westphalian berserk button.

Plus, the UN doesn't do that kind of thing. Nations might be able to forge a Health Coalition with trade agreements to make it possible, with a Foundation created to pay for it and manage it, but that would be a really major undertaking. It would also need to be arbitrated nationally to some degree because the cost to run it can't come from the Foundation's funds if the member states aren't putting in the cash. If someone was slacking the rest pick up the tab, and if one nation doesn't have a mandate and another does it skews the costs again. You'd need it to be an international organization that only functions when each nation enacts a standard set of principles that allows them to opt-in.

The United Nations doesn't have the operational capability to do that kind of thing any more than a School Board has the ability to raise an army.

But technically, because larger pools are always better for spreading risk and negotiating rates, yes. You never want a smaller pool than you have to have, but the barriers to running a transnational health-care program are utterly profound. If you presume that Emperor Palpatine shows up in the Death Star and tells all of us that we're now Imperial Citizens, and are part of a modern health-care plan (The CoruscantCares Dictum) then our health-care risks and rates are probably going to be much lower than if we were even running it at a global scale. Depending, of course, on how it is run.
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Edi
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Re: US government Shutdown

Post by Edi »

Something for everyone to consider:
Michael Lind on Salon.com wrote: Sunday, Oct 6, 2013 02:05 PM +0300
Tea Party radicalism is misunderstood: Meet the “Newest Right”
Our sense of the force currently paralyzing the government is full of misconceptions -- including what to call it
By Michael Lind

To judge from the commentary inspired by the shutdown, most progressives and centrists, and even many non-Tea Party conservatives, do not understand the radical force that has captured the Republican Party and paralyzed the federal government. Having grown up in what is rapidly becoming a Tea Party heartland–Texas–I think I do understand it. Allow me to clear away a few misconceptions about what really should be called, not the Tea Party Right, but the Newest Right.

The first misconception that is widespread in the commentariat is that the Newest Right can be thought of as being simply a group of “extremists” who happen to be further on the same political spectrum on which leftists, liberals, centrists and moderate conservatives find their places. But reducing politics to points on a single line is more confusing than enlightening. Most political movements result from the intersection of several axes—ideology, class, occupation, religion, ethnicity and region—of which abstract ideology is seldom the most important.

The second misconception is that the Newest Right or Tea Party Right is populist. The data, however, show that Tea Party activists and leaders on average are more affluent than the average American. The white working class often votes for the Newest Right, but then the white working class has voted for Republicans ever since Nixon. For all its Jacksonian populist rhetoric, the Newest Right is no more a rebellion of the white working class than was the original faux-populist Jacksonian movement, led by rich slaveowners like Andrew Jackson and agents of New York banks like Martin Van Buren.

The third misconception is that the Newest Right is irrational. The American center-left, whose white social base is among highly-educated, credentialed individuals like professors and professionals, repeatedly has committed political suicide by assuming that anyone who disagrees with its views is an ignorant “Neanderthal.” Progressive snobs to the contrary, the leaders of the Newest Right, including Harvard-educated Ted Cruz, like the leaders of any successful political movement, tend to be highly educated and well-off. The self-described members of the Tea Party tend to be more affluent and educated than the general public.

The Newest Right, then, cannot be explained in terms of abstract ideological extremism, working-class populism or ignorance and stupidity. What, then, is the Newest Right?

The Newest Right is the simply the old Jeffersonian-Jacksonian right, adopting new strategies in response to changed circumstances. While it has followers nationwide, its territorial bases are the South and the West, particularly the South, whose population dwarfs that of the Mountain and Prairie West. According to one study by scholars at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas:
While less than one in five (19.4%) minority non-Southerners and about 36% of Anglo non-Southerners report supporting the movement, almost half of white Southerners (47.1%) express support….

In fact, the role that antigovernment sentiment in the South plays in Tea Party movement support is the strongest in our analysis.
The Tea Party right is not only disproportionately Southern but also disproportionately upscale. Its social base consists of what, in other countries, are called the “local notables”—provincial elites whose power and privileges are threatened from above by a stronger central government they do not control and from below by the local poor and the local working class.

Even though, like the Jacksonians and Confederates of the nineteenth century, they have allies in places like Wisconsin and Massachusetts, the dominant members of the Newest Right are white Southern local notables—the Big Mules, as the Southern populist Big Jim Folsom once described the lords of the local car dealership, country club and chamber of commerce. These are not the super-rich of Silicon Valley or Wall Street (although they have Wall Street allies). The Koch dynasty rooted in Texas notwithstanding, those who make up the backbone of the Newest Right are more likely to be millionaires than billionaires, more likely to run low-wage construction or auto supply businesses than multinational corporations. They are second-tier people on a national level but first-tier people in their states and counties and cities.

For nearly a century, from the end of Reconstruction, when white Southern terrorism drove federal troops out of the conquered South, until the Civil Rights Revolution, the South’s local notables maintained their control over a region of the U.S. larger than Western Europe by means of segregation, disenfranchisement, and bloc voting and the filibuster at the federal level. Segregation created a powerless black workforce and helped the South’s notables pit poor whites against poor blacks. The local notables also used literacy tests and other tricks to disenfranchise lower-income whites as well as blacks in the South, creating a distinctly upscale electorate. Finally, by voting as a unit in Congress and presidential elections, the “Solid South” sought to thwart any federal reforms that could undermine the power of Southern notables at the state, county and city level. When the Solid South failed, Southern senators made a specialty of the filibuster, the last defense of the embattled former Confederacy.

When the post-Civil War system broke down during the Civil Rights Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, the South’s local notable class and its Northern and Western allies unexpectedly won a temporary three-decade reprieve, thanks to the “Reagan Democrats.” From the 1970s to the 2000s, white working-class voters alienated from the Democratic Party by civil rights and cultural liberalism made possible Republican presidential dominance from Reagan to George W. Bush and Republican dominance of Congress from 1994 to 2008. Because their politicians dominated the federal government much of the time, the conservative notables were less threatened by federal power, and some of them, like the second Bush, could even imagine a “governing conservatism” which, I have argued, sought to “Southernize” the entire U.S.

But then, by the 2000s, demography destroyed the temporary Nixon-to-Bush conservative majority (although conceivably it could enjoy an illusory Indian summer if Republicans pick up the Senate and retain the House in 2016). Absent ever-growing shares of the white vote, in the long run the Republican Party cannot win without attracting more black and Latino support.

That may well happen, in the long run. But right now most conservative white local notables in the South and elsewhere in the country don’t want black and Latino support. They would rather disenfranchise blacks and Latinos than compete for their votes. And they would rather dismantle the federal government than surrender their local power and privilege.

The political strategy of the Newest Right, then, is simply a new strategy for the very old, chiefly-Southern Jefferson-Jackson right. It is a perfectly rational strategy, given its goal: maximizing the political power and wealth of white local notables who find themselves living in states, and eventually a nation, with present or potential nonwhite majorities.

Although racial segregation can no longer be employed, the tool kit of the older Southern white right is pretty much the same as that of the Newest Right:

The Solid South. By means of partisan and racial gerrymandering—packing white liberal voters into conservative majority districts and ghettoizing black and Latino voters–Republicans in Texas and other Southern and Western states control the U.S. Congress, even though in the last election more Americans voted for Democrats than Republicans. The same undemocratic technique makes the South far more Republican in its political representation than it really is in terms of voters.

The Filibuster. By using a semi-filibuster to help shut down the government rather than implement Obamacare, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is acting rationally on behalf of his constituency—the surburban and exurban white local notables of Texas and other states, whom the demagogic Senator seems to confuse with “the American people.” Newt Gingrich, another Southern conservative demagogue, pioneered the modern use of government shutdowns and debt-ceiling negotiations as supplements to the classic filibuster used by embattled white provincial elites who prefer to paralyze a federal government they cannot control.

Disenfranchisement. In state after state controlled by Republican governors and legislators, a fictitious epidemic of voter fraud is being used as an excuse for onerous voter registration requirements which have the effect, and the manifest purpose, of disenfranchising disproportionately poor blacks and Latinos. The upscale leaders of the Newest Right also tend to have be more supportive of mass immigration than their downscale populist supporters—on the condition, however, that “guest workers” and amnestied illegal immigrants not be allowed to vote or become citizens any time soon. In the twenty-first century, as in the twentieth and nineteenth, the Southern ideal is a society in which local white elites lord it over a largely-nonwhite population of poor workers who can’t vote.

Localization and privatization of federal programs. It is perfectly rational for the white local notables of the South and their allies in other regions to oppose universal, federal social programs, if they expect to lose control of the federal government to a new, largely-nonwhite national electoral majority.

Turning over federal programs to the states allows Southern states controlled by local conservative elites to make those programs less generous—thereby attracting investment to their states by national and global corporations seeking low wages.

Privatizing other federal programs allows affluent whites in the South and elsewhere to turn the welfare state into a private country club for those who can afford to pay the fees, with underfunded public clinics and emergency rooms for the lower orders. In the words of Mitt Romney: “We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care.”

When the election of Lincoln seemed to foreshadow a future national political majority based outside of the South, the local notables of the South tried to create a smaller system they could dominate by seceding from the U.S. That effort failed, after having killed more Americans than have been killed in all our foreign wars combined. However, during Reconstruction the Southern elite snatched victory from the jaws of defeat and succeeded in turning the South into a nation-within-a-nation within U.S. borders until the 1950s and 1960s.

Today the white notables of the South increasingly live in states like Texas, which already have nonwhite majorities. They fear that Obama’s election, like Lincoln’s, foreshadows the emergence of a new national majority coalition that excludes them and will act against their interest. Having been reduced to the status of members of a minority race, they fear they will next lose their status as members of the dominant local class.

While each of the Newest Right’s proposals and policies might be defended by libertarians or conservatives on other grounds, the package as a whole—from privatizing Social Security and Medicare to disenfranchising likely Democratic voters to opposing voting rights and citizenship for illegal immigrants to chopping federal programs into 50 state programs that can be controlled by right-wing state legislatures—represents a coherent and rational strategy for maximizing the relative power of provincial white elites at a time when their numbers are in decline and history has turned against them. They are not ignoramuses, any more than Jacksonian, Confederate and Dixiecrat elites were idiots. They know what they want and they have a plan to get it—which may be more than can be said for their opponents.

Michael Lind is the author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States and co-founder of the New America Foundation.
In that light, everything the Republicans are doing makes a lot of sense and the only way to stop them is hammer them back as hard as possible and take absolutely no prisoners when dealing with them.
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amigocabal
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Re: US government Shutdown

Post by amigocabal »

Irbis wrote:
Covenant wrote:That's why I find the Republican opposition so baffling, it's not like the Bible says Thou Shalt Not Suffer The Poor To Live Better or anything. It's not even good for businesses for employees to lose work-days and for them to have to handle leave and so forth. The situation as it is just ends up bad for everyone.
As someone pointed out in talk with me - Republithugs ever since Reagan have one commandment, 'state is bad, private is good'. What if Obamacare works? What if people start liking it?

Why, Democrats will gain very powerful weapon in example visible to everyone that national system can be better one than private network of profiting bloodsuckers. What then? What Republicans and other la-la land Libertarians fall back to? They have nothing, just one worn out phrase, going back to old racism and religious fundamentalism won't give them any more votes. Even their other bastions, like gun control and education written by states might start to crumble once fundament that protected them has rotted.
Why do you believe that Republicans and Libertarians are the same? I sometimes read Reason.com and neither the authors nor commenters ever confused the two. Nor have I ever heard of Libertarians pandering to the religious right.

There are only two problemsx with health care in this country, neither which the ACA actually addresses.

1. No Price Controls Price controls have a great track record of keeping costs down(such as limiting the price of grocery bags to ten cents per bag.) . And yet, there are no laws that, for example, caps the price of doctor visits to $10, CAT scans at $100, chemotherapy at $1,000, or open heart surgery for $10,000.

Sarah Kliff of the Washington Post wrote: In other countries, that cannot happen: Their federal governments set rates for what both private and public plans can charge for various procedures. Those countries have tended to see much lower growth in health-care costs.

What sets our really expensive health-care system apart from most others isn't necessarily the fact it's not single-payer or universal. It's that the federal government does not regulate the prices that health-care providers can charge.
Note that capping health provider prices will also lower health insurance costs.

2. Health Insurance Is Not Treated Like Auto Insurance the following article excerpt explains what would go wrong with auto insurance if it was like health insurance.

Stephen Benold, M.D. wrote:There are no prices on any product, because each customer pays a different price depending on their auto insurance. An exception are customers without insurance, who pay 30 percent more than anyone else, because no “discount” has been negotiated for them by an insurance company or the government. A card confirming auto insurance must be presented before each purchase; the clerk states your co-pay amount (which varies with each customer), and the rest of your purchase is filed with your insurance company. The filling station is three times as large as the ones you remember from your youth, because there are three clerical workers for each employee actually servicing your automobile.
the rest of the article explains what is wrong with health insurance as it is.
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Re: US government Shutdown

Post by Broomstick »

Grumman wrote:
Irbis wrote:As someone pointed out in talk with me - Republithugs ever since Reagan have one commandment, 'state is bad, private is good'. What if Obamacare works? What if people start liking it?

Why, Democrats will gain very powerful weapon in example visible to everyone that national system can be better one than private network of profiting bloodsuckers.
How do you figure that? How does forcing people to do business with said profiteering bloodsuckers and people coming to appreciate that state of affairs convince them that the alternative is better?
Keep in mind that even though the ACA as it currently stands requires the public to do business with “profiteering bloodsuckers” there is additional regulation to prevent egregious exploitation and limit the costs to the individuals involved. Of course, regulation is an anathema to the far right and just makes the whole thing more distasteful.
amigocabal wrote:
As for the why the federal government should mandate it instead of the states? Bigger pool = more powerful negotiation = lower costs.
So the United Nations would be even better for providing health care, then.
In theory, yes. A pool of 6 billion people would have advantages over a pool measured in mere hundreds of millions.

I don't, however, see a realistic means of doing this in our present world. There are just too many practical obstacles to overcome, most of which were covered by Covenant.

I will note that there have been successful global initiatives in the public health sector, most notably the extinction of wild smallpox in the 1970's. While not possible at this point in time more global approaches to healthcare might well develop in the future.
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Re: US government Shutdown

Post by Simon_Jester »

Covenant wrote:[If you presume that Emperor Palpatine shows up in the Death Star and tells all of us that we're now Imperial Citizens, and are part of a modern health-care plan (The CoruscantCares Dictum) then our health-care risks and rates are probably going to be much lower than if we were even running it at a global scale. Depending, of course, on how it is run.
I think at that point we'd hit the limiting case, because then we're lumped in with people who aren't even the same species, and have totally non-comparable health care issues. Thus, I think we'd hit diminishing returns.

A planetary health care system would provide net improvements in health on average, at very low cost... because it would cause a huge flow of money from the developed world to subsidize improved health in the developing world. This is a net positive for humanity as a whole- but it's not so good for some developed nations, and realistically won't happen within our lifetimes.

A national system is 'right-sized' for the current structure of human civilization (and this I say to Amigocabal). Many other nations have it, it works well for them, they get roughly the same health care outcomes we do, at much lower cost. It's a wonderful solution.
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Re: US government Shutdown

Post by Replicant »

Thanas wrote:Here is another reason why CRs cannot be allowed to be passed piece by piece - because if you fund anything the right wants funded, then you effectively passed a budget tailored by the right. No way would they (or should they, from the view of their ideology) then engage in constructive talks.
At this point neither side has had any interest in constructive talks.

The Right is happy with the fake shutdown and the points it wins with those that hate the government and the boondoggle that is Obamacare. At the same time the Left is enjoying the media attention that they are getting from being able to point at the GOP as the reason for the shutdown.

What I don't get is the Obama Administration. Being all ASSHOLE and kicking people out of parks, out of their homes on federal land, closing off monuments that are not manned on a regular basis anyway, etc, etc, while keeping Camp David open (certainly not vital) and having the President play golf. Is NOT going to win you points. I am not sure if they think they are winning in the polls but the news reports indicate that every day the Administration closes something down just to be a dick just hurts them more and more.

Just found out that while Michelle Obama's keep kids fit website is still up and running the Federal Government has shut down the Amber Alert website. :roll:
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Re: US government Shutdown

Post by Siege »

I'm sure a few federal parks being temporarily shuttered is a terrible inconvenience, but let me just point out that the Nazi's did quite a bit worse than kicking people out of parks.
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Re: US government Shutdown

Post by Borgholio »

Did someone just wave their hand and compare the closing of Yosemite National Park to what happened at Auschwitz?
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Re: US government Shutdown

Post by Replicant »

Borgholio wrote:Did someone just wave their hand and compare the closing of Yosemite National Park to what happened at Auschwitz?

You are right, I was out of line. I shall replace Nazi with asshole in my post. My point remains though. I am sure the administration is spending more money closing the WW2 monument putting up and wiring barricades in place and having security there now to keep the barricades in place than is actually spent on the memorial on a daily basis.

This is purely a game of who can do a better job of pissing off the American people while pointing their fingers at the other side and I don't think this is working for the Administration.

No one is really buying that either side in Congress has anything to do with closing off what is essentially an open field with a monument in it.
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Re: US government Shutdown

Post by Broomstick »

Replicant wrote:The Right is happy with the fake shutdown and the points it wins with those that hate the government and the boondoggle that is Obamacare.
The shutdown is not "fake", major segments of the US Federal government really are shut down.

Or is it not real to you until the US airspace is shut down due to the air traffic controllers being sent home and no police or fire protection provided for the US capital?

Also, Obamacare is not yet proven to be a boondoogle. One of the reasons for the shutdown is the fear on the Right that it won't be a boondoggle.
What I don't get is the Obama Administration. Being all ASSHOLE and kicking people out of parks, out of their homes on federal land, closing off monuments that are not manned on a regular basis anyway, etc, etc, while keeping Camp David open (certainly not vital) and having the President play golf.
Technically, Camp David is a military installation not a park or public facility. Therefore, it's operation and maintenance is funded through the military which, presumably, still has available funds for such purposes.
Just found out that while Michelle Obama's keep kids fit website is still up and running the Federal Government has shut down the Amber Alert website. :roll:
The keep kids fit website doesn't require the frequent updates and maintenance of the Amber Alert system, so basically you can just leave the first website up to run on momentum, as it were, and the second goes down because the necessary support personnel aren't available, having been sent home.

Is it really that hard for you to think it through?
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Re: US government Shutdown

Post by Replicant »

Broomstick wrote:
Replicant wrote:The Right is happy with the fake shutdown and the points it wins with those that hate the government and the boondoggle that is Obamacare.
The shutdown is not "fake", major segments of the US Federal government really are shut down.

Or is it not real to you until the US airspace is shut down due to the air traffic controllers being sent home and no police or fire protection provided for the US capital?

Also, Obamacare is not yet proven to be a boondoogle. One of the reasons for the shutdown is the fear on the Right that it won't be a boondoggle.
What I don't get is the Obama Administration. Being all ASSHOLE and kicking people out of parks, out of their homes on federal land, closing off monuments that are not manned on a regular basis anyway, etc, etc, while keeping Camp David open (certainly not vital) and having the President play golf.
Technically, Camp David is a military installation not a park or public facility. Therefore, it's operation and maintenance is funded through the military which, presumably, still has available funds for such purposes.
Just found out that while Michelle Obama's keep kids fit website is still up and running the Federal Government has shut down the Amber Alert website. :roll:
The keep kids fit website doesn't require the frequent updates and maintenance of the Amber Alert system, so basically you can just leave the first website up to run on momentum, as it were, and the second goes down because the necessary support personnel aren't available, having been sent home.

Is it really that hard for you to think it through?

Nope, I can think it through just fine, I just have no interest in jumping through the justification hoops you are. Technically or not Camp David serves little purpose when the President is not there. No reason for it to be open.

Second, if one website is taken down due to government shutdown then all non-critical should be taken down. This last weekend the Armed Services network stopped sending NFL games overseas for servicemen to watch. Are you suggesting that there is extensive day to day work done so the troops can watch those games? Yeah sure, I am guessing its all in place along with a long term contract with whatever provider is supply the games. But suddenly the shutdown means the troops didn't get to watch NFL Sunday.

What the Obama Administration is doing is no different than what previous administrations have done. Previous Administrations have intentionally dicked the public by "closing" as much federal land as possible to make a point. I am just wondering why they think it works. I am not pointing out this Administration as being any worse than others that have done the same. Though I don't believe any previous administration has ever tried to close the entire Florida Gulf before. :roll:
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Re: US government Shutdown

Post by Lagmonster »

Edi wrote:Something for everyone to consider:

Michael Lind on Salon.com

In that light, everything the Republicans are doing makes a lot of sense and the only way to stop them is hammer them back as hard as possible and take absolutely no prisoners when dealing with them.
This is the kind of article that people like me, who don't know the details of American political history, read and go, "Whoa, that is really instructive, if it's true!". And then go, "Okay, how the fuck do I find out if it's true?"
Note: I'm semi-retired from the board, so if you need something, please be patient.
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Re: US government Shutdown

Post by Replicant »

Lagmonster wrote:
Edi wrote:Something for everyone to consider:

Michael Lind on Salon.com

In that light, everything the Republicans are doing makes a lot of sense and the only way to stop them is hammer them back as hard as possible and take absolutely no prisoners when dealing with them.
This is the kind of article that people like me, who don't know the details of American political history, read and go, "Whoa, that is really instructive, if it's true!". And then go, "Okay, how the fuck do I find out if it's true?"
I started to read through it but got to this point:

" For all its Jacksonian populist rhetoric, the Newest Right is no more a rebellion of the white working class than was the original faux-populist Jacksonian movement, led by rich slaveowners like Andrew Jackson and agents of New York banks like Martin Van Buren."

And decided that if your willing to compare your opponents to slave-owners then I am not going to trust you to be very objective.
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