dagblog - Comments for "Bernie Sanders' Medicare for all Town Hall"

The probably gram that he ran

CVille Dem — Mon, 29 Jan 2018 19:12:30 +0000

In reply to Bernie Sanders' Medicare for all Town Hall

The program that he ran sounds excellent. Good speakers with credibility and facts. I guess what I am left wondering is why the first phase of expanding Medicare would have to be all or nothing. I realize that the healthiest group are working people, but if they want to keeps email loges-provided health care (even knowing that if they get sick they can lose it) let them keep it.

Medicare is far superior, a better value, and includes people who consume a lot of health care. HOWEVER, it won’t work unless there is a mandate. With Medicare ‘s coverage there is a percentage of cost that most seniors defray by purchasing supplemental coverage. If this part wasn’t mandated it would provide affordable health care at reasonable cost. No more medical bankruptcies, and many people would also opt for supplemental policies.

Over time more working people would opt in and eventually supplemental plans would fold in, and VOILA!

Of course the bad news is that the GOP successfully poisoned enough minds against a true, and mostly successful attempt at helping people get health care. Then they sabotaged it with every voodoo pin they could find. They convinced people who had access to a doctor for the first time in years that OBAMACARE was taking away their rights. Are we prepared to fight against their dirty wars?

I apologize if there are mistakes. I am in the car.

Wow Flavius, first you claim

ocean-kat — Sun, 28 Jan 2018 21:35:37 +0000

In reply to Random comments .

Wow Flavius, first you claim to be against ad hominums then you launch a vicious attack on your mother comparing her to a Mack truck, your own mother. Everyone knows moms are off limits! Even during the most heated argument no one has attacked Hal's mom though if you had met her you'd likely know how easy it would be to launch such an attack. Also there's a total lack of nuance. With wheels your mom might be a Ford or if she's a tough old broad, a Dodge. If she's old and going into her second childhood a better comparison might be a tricycle. I'm shocked at both the viciousness and lack of complexity in your comment.

TOS violation?

The mention of Keynes reminds

moat — Sun, 28 Jan 2018 20:03:04 +0000

In reply to Random comments .

The mention of Keynes reminds me of something he did not change his opinion upon over the years, the casino like behavior of speculative markets. Brad Delong has a good paraphrase of the idea:

Of the maxims of orthodox finance none, surely, is more anti-social than the fetish of liquidity, the doctrine that it is a positive virtue on the part of investment institutions to concentrate their resources upon the holding of ‘liquid’ securities. It forgets that there is no such thing as liquidity of investment for the community as a whole. The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelop our future. The actual, private object of the most skilled investment to-day is ‘to beat the gun’, as the Americans so well express it, to outwit the crowd, and to pass the bad, or depreciating, half-crown to the other fellow.

I don't understand what a "trade policy" is if it is not presented in the context of the capital markets all investment occur within. I imagine Keynes' first objection to Milton Friedman shaking the pom-poms for unfettered global markets would simply be the idea that it would achieve a social end by itself.

I have a similar objection to the idea that establishing the rules of trade with enterprises in other countries will result in a better social end by itself. If it was part of an industrial policy that aimed at increasing the quality of life while working, then it would at least be an argument. As a stand alone view of economy that suggests it holds the answer to bad investment is just as magical as the system it would replace.

Have you asked these

Anonymous — Sun, 28 Jan 2018 18:12:04 +0000

In reply to What is more important to you

Have you asked these questions of your preferred candidate for governor of Maryland, Ben Jealous? Does he share your and Bernie's views too, HSG?

During the 80s I spent a fair

PeraclesPlease — Sun, 28 Jan 2018 17:53:00 +0000

In reply to Was a surprise to me that

During the 80s I spent a fair amount of time thinking about Petra Kelly's Green Party & the call to ban advertising. It was presumed at the time that advertisers were parasites who provided no value, but advertising is a type of communication and signaling that improves the purchase process and arguably gives the consumer more information about the products being sold, especially if false advertising is policed.

Now that we have much of our economy funded by micropayements for advertising, it's rather bizarre to go back to these ideas. The problem with buyer decisions is they're often made in the dark, with a very limited competitive space. Having fine-tuned advertising lets the consumer get that tiny piece of info from the South Pacific along with that from New York, Topeka, LA, Stuttgart... Of course it's far from perfect - few buyers move past the 1st page of their Google search - but we as buyers find many more options in terms of quality, diversity, price, availability, support, etc. It's a bit strange to want to fence people unflinchingly in so they can't take advantage of better deals. Especially since we made such a big deal about bringing down The Wall that kept East Europeans from accessing information and quality goods, and have long bragged about how competitive we are. So we can read about these cheaper better goods, but we shouldn't be able to purchase them? Very strange. even more bizarre, it ignores our great advantage and surplus in intellectual property and online services.

Reminds me of what a great man once said...

Was a surprise to me that

artappraiser — Sun, 28 Jan 2018 17:16:34 +0000

In reply to It's tough discussing any of

Was a surprise to me that when we got into a discussion recently on another thread, about the possibility of future automation causing guaranteed minimum income for doing nothing except being alive coming into being, Hal's opinion was negative. He felt that labor was important to self-worth. If that's true, people end up assigning different values to different labors. Not to mention: that's trade...and then, the more someone outside that trading regulates it, the more people think something unfair is going on....you bring home a whole deer from a couple days of hunting and all you get for it is a few berries?

I agree with you on all

CVille Dem — Sun, 28 Jan 2018 15:40:31 +0000

In reply to It's important to me because

I agree with you on all points. It is also true that he certainly couldn’t run as a fake Democrat again. He certainly burned that bridge to a cinder. He also has no developed policies; only wishes without a pathway to achieve those wishes. So an over-the-hill guy with plenty of baggage, running as an Independent, who has no history of accomplishment, or collaborative work..the GOP’S wet dream because of people like Hal who can only think about how bad Democrats would be.

It's tough discussing any of

PeraclesPlease — Sun, 28 Jan 2018 10:11:42 +0000

In reply to It is true that requiring

It's tough discussing any of this with you because you seem to have 0 economics training & 0 interest in looking at economic things objectively with the types of basic frameworks that most economists agree on.

A consumer will have a maximum price that she will pay for any good. If the combination of labor cost, materials, transportation, shop or eCommece expenses and investor/entrepreneur margin add up to be too much for the consumer, or if the consumer feels a 2nd model is of good enough quality for less price, she will either not buy or choose the more affordable model (assuming marketing hasn't created some perceived extra value to commit that buy decision anyway).

Since most products are complex, they depend on an international supply chain, so some pieces are domestically produced, some internationally produced, with typically the sales & marketing costs & profits all domestic. And typically the sales & marketing margin is much greater than the profit of physical production. So a tariff on foreign parts could raise prices & lower sales and kill the much more profitable sales & marketing portion of activity.

Additionally there are issues like availability. Socialist times taught us that without decent profit incentives, some goods or spare parts or pharmaceuticals simply don't get made. So the first time I walked into a socialist store, there was a shelf full of some weird thin tomato-cabbage-carrrot-pea puree and not much else in way of sauces; 2 types of juice concentrates and none other; 2 types of bread and none other, no citrus fruit or bananas as those were too expensive for everyone, etc. Everyone got paid nearly the same, from factory worker to college researcher to company president - and nobody could afford anything nice except for the under-the-table/behind-the-scenes benefits like a deal on a car or fix the fridge for cheaper in exchange for English lessons or some other barter, as well as the factory benefits like a ski cottage that all employees might be able to use.

Yes, workers can be paid "too little", but as noted, they'll be competing against foreign workers for part of the product, so you have to differentiate between what makes sense overall and component-wise to produce locally and what to produce abroad.

Plus, the minimum price of a house in San Francisco is over $200K - in Nashville it's $47K, as an article notes on why millennials are moving out of the cities to the suburbs/exburbs or into flyover country, counter to myths that they'd flock to cities. So am I going to pay the worker the same in San Francisco as what I pay her in Nashville where her housing costs are 1/4? This is 1 reason why the unified minimum wage across the US didn't make sense. A $10-15 entree is normal in DC - not in Des Moines.

Also, wages tend to bunch towards the bottom, and the higher minimum wage lessens wage differentiation - so you have a high-school part-time pizza delivery worker making the same as a partly trained nurse and the same as a same as a road worker and the same as a teacher with X years experience.... - what's the incentive to get trained up and gain experience when all the focus is on a level bottom line? The idea of the minimum wage was to guarantee survival and some degree of fairness, not to promote equality and equivalence of all people.

Random comments .

Flavius — Sun, 28 Jan 2018 07:08:33 +0000

In reply to Bernie Sanders' Medicare for all Town Hall

Random comments .

Hal, keep on hanging in there. You aren't an authoritarian. If Bernie hadn't run Hillary would have won. I wish she had. I don't resent Bernie's running against her. I think Bernie would have been a fine president. If you can be mayor of Burlington you can be president of the US.

Trump's trade policy isn't stupid per se ;Keynes started his career as a believer in increased trade and ended arguing" Let all good be homespun". Interestingly he came to believe increased Trade is more apt to create wars than reduce them..

We can't win with just us. They have much more money and the Supremes have essentially ruled that they can spend it as they see fit. And sadly, most people aren't nice most of the time. Including me and all the rest of us here.

Maybe it goes back to Eve eating that damn apple.

I wish you guys and gals could argue without ad hominums but if my mother had wheels she'd have been a Mack Truck.

A handful won't stop the

NCD — Sun, 28 Jan 2018 04:39:26 +0000

In reply to NCD - Can we then unite in

A handful won't stop the Republicans. The Party must be united, no purity tests. We must support every Democrat who makes final cut.

We must inform voters the GOP is enriching the wealthy who crashed the economy in 2008, and robbing our kids to pay for it with huge deficits. CNN just reported the billionaire Koch brothers are spending an unprecedented $600 million to con the public on the tax cuts to help defeat Democrats and hold Congress for the GOP.

They must be fought with every blog and dollar we can produce. We can support any candidates we want locally, but must back all Democrats on the ballot in November.