Maybe if the middle class understood that the national debt is going to be solely their responsibility they might get angry enough to get involved.
Someday, the national debt will come due. Who will pay it back?
Not the poor, they don't have any money.
And not the rich. The rich will say, "We make up only 5% of the population (or 2%, depending on how you define "rich") why should we pay off a debt that was run up by 100% of the population?"
And then the rich will drop out of the economy and live off their wealth, leaving the middle class - and the middle class alone - tens of trillions of dollars in the hole.
Moral of the story: the national debt is a middle-class debt.
Drives me absolutely nuts when our leftist/communists complain about the non-rich "voting against their own interests." Their attitude says, "Hey, there's room at the trough! Get your snout in here! (and vote for me!)"
I guess gvt-driven stealing isn't really stealing, right?
If you are looking to the government to solve problems, you are looking in the wrong place!!
The government CANNOT provide better health care, so quit asking it to do so. The ONLY place where problems are actually solved is the private sector. The only thing the government can do is warp the rules to give priority to some segment of the population to access that is above some other segment of the population. Government does not invent drugs, create new treatments, or even do research... it FUNDS these things in the most inefficient manner possible. And the government takes a cut of all money passing through its fingers.
You blast conservatives about health care, but you are dead wrong!! The problem is government and government officials... and fools like you that believe in them. If you think national health care would be wonderful, just look at those systems in Canada and the UK. In both of those systems, getting to see a doctor, or even a nurse-practitioner, takes forever. And people die waiting for treatments. People are not dying in the U.S. because they cannot get to see a practitioner... they have financial issues because they have to pay for some things. In a government-run system, the practitioners are not paid well, which drives them out of medicine, and treatment is rationed, leading to unnecessary misery and death. It is all about controlling costs, not providing quality care. Bureaucrats that provide no added value are in there to take a salary, cutting into the available money. If you think it's better, I suggest you move there for a few years... but don't get a serious illness, as you won't be able to come back.
As for mental health care, it is widely available for both employed and unemployed. Those who are not employed or not employable can get health care (medical and mental health) at taxpayer expense through various agencies. The problem is that many do not seek help and reject the treatment offered. Sometimes they take the medicine for a short while, then stop. Since treatment cannot be forced upon them, except in very rare circumstances, they go back to their ways (homelessness) without treatment. Many homeless reject help with a home, because they don't want to live by the rules of those who want to help them (e.g. no drugs, treatment plans).
Self-employed health insurance IS expensive, but it's available. Allowing insurance through other groups, like associations for certain fields (accounting, farm coops, retail, etc) would help, but that seems to be available in only a few states.
If you want to fix things, get the Progressives and Marxists out of government at every level. Marxism only leads to corruption and death. In the 20'th century, Marxism was responsible for the deaths of 300,000,000+ people. In my lifetime (almost 70 years), we have NEVER seen a smaller government in America. Maybe we should try that once. Maybe we should actually try capitalism, just once, since that hasn't been the way for America in over 100 years. We agree on one thing... get rid of all these garbage social programs! But we DO NOT have the money to do any of what you suggest we spend money on. We are over $200T in debt, that will NEVER be paid off, especially if we go do what you suggest.
The deep cultural problem the USA has is lack of personal responsibility. We have had decades of "education" that says that the world owes you something, just because you are able to breathe and it is ALWAYS someone else's fault. And everything should be "free". Free healthcare, free college (never mind that 2/3 of adults do NOT go to college and they, on average, make far less than those with college degrees), free food, free housing, free money... all kinds of "free stuff" from the government coffers.
We have people who believe that there should be a government mandated "minimum" amount you time is worth, which is absolutely not true. Your time is worth what you put into it and bring to the workplace. If your effort is worth $2/hr, that's what you should be paid. If your effort is worth $1,000/hr, that's what you should be paid. And the government has no business sticking it's nose into the arrangement. If a potential employer doesn't pay you what you believe you are worth, there are other employers (and, for the employers, other employees). On the other hand, if you "contract" for a certain compensation and the employer fails to deliver after you delivered for them, that is a matter for the courts.
We have a culture that believes money provided through the federal government is "free", so states and municipalities spend if freely, with no thoughts about where that money really came from. I've seen this first-hand, as an employee of a state university, where the department head says something like: we have to spend $30,000 by the end of next month... what should we buy?
If you want healthcare that is not attached (note you said attacked) to your job, then work to get the insurance laws, regulations, and companies to include both individual policies (which I believe are available everywhere) or attached to a group of some sort (e.g. coop, association, club, neighborhood, church, etc) that you can join to negotiate lower premiums or better coverage. Insurance works this way... the insurance company is pooling costs from a lot of people (the group) and determines a risk assessment. From there, they determine how much each member of the group should pay into the "kitty" to cover costs incurred by members. Most insurance companies are incorporated as non-profit organizations. There are organizations that pool health care costs and are not considered insurance companies (e.g. https://www.onesharehealth.com/en/). I've never been part of one, but I've heard people who are part of one talk about it on radio programs. By the way, a lot of health insurance policies are "self-insured" employer plans, which means the employer pays a company to administer a plan, but all the health costs are paid by the employer, with a combination of employer funds and employee contributions to be included in the plan.
I'm not going to defend crooked politicians, but if you want more government, you are asking for more crooked politicians. And there are many of those. There are also a lot of crooked bureaucrats, who are probably WORSE than the politicians, because the politicians CAN be removed from office, while the bureaucrats cannot.
If you are going to complain about insurance companies, though, you should complain about the WORST of those, which is Medicare. With an insurance company, there is someone to call and complain to when a claim is denied, but not Medicare. If you can't get the insurance company to do something they should, you have 2 more roads to recourse: the insurance commissioner and the courts. Neither of those is available to you with Medicare. Believe me, you DO NOT want what you would get with "Medicare for All".
As for the "lockdown" and people left with no healthcare, there are two causes: 1) the government organization that put the employer out of business and had to let people go; 2) the government that created the abomination called Obamacare (a/k/a "The Affordable Healthcare Act", which is anything but). Remember that Obamacare a) forced people into plans for which there were no healthcare providers near them; b) forced people to buy insurance they could not afford OR pay a penalty for not buying the insurance they could not afford.
As for reduction in the size of government, I will repeat myself by pointing out that the size of government has NEVER gotten smaller, under any administration, because the f-ing Demoncrats have engineered the system to make that impossible. Even with the most conservative administrations of Reagan and Trump, the size of government went up. When they have a "government shutdown", only 17% of government is affected, because the rest of it is "essential" and cannot be stopped. And there is a lot of those "useless garbage social programs" you mentioned earlier. It's the f-ing Demoncrats and RINO "Republicans" that keep the gravy train driving power and money into their own coffers.
In case you are interested, since 1932, the Republicans have controlled Congress for a total of 14 years, while the Democrats have controlled Congress for a total of 56 years (4 times as long as Republicans). Other years were split between the two parties.
The only way to fix this country is to pass a Constitutional Amendment that: a) wipes out ALL government programs; b) limits the spending to what the government can take in; and c) strictly limits what the government can take from citizens and businesses, without the approval of a 3/4 majority of state legislatures and that approval limited to a single year. We need to repeal the 17th amendment, which took the selection of members of the U.S. Senate from the state legislatures to a popular vote, leaving the state legislatures without recourse to control the members of the senate. The original configuration provided the House to represent the people of the country and the Senate to represent the States. The 17th amendment separated the state governments from the Congress, which now imposes rules on the states without consideration of the effect on the state governments.
Along with useless programs, we have entirely useless departments that regulate things the federal government should not be involved in. Department of Energy, Department of Commerce, Department of Education, Department of Health and Human Services... all unconstitutional interference in states' responsibilities. And then there's the Department of Homeland Security, which is anything and everything but homeland security. Read the 10th Amendment...
"Conservatives are so dumb..." Well at least I'm not as dumb as progressives who think government is the answer to everything. You want to bang on the US for having cultural problems and poor education? Well the clue phone is ringing, why not pick it up and see who has been driving the bus towards personal irresponsibility, no accounting to God at judgment day, CRT, gender confusion and the victim mentality, identity politics, and the whole "everybody owes me a living, simply because I'm here, irregardless of whether I've lifted a darn finger to earn it." (Or whether I'm even here legally, right?) Jesus said; "if you don't work, you don't eat." How does that put me on the hook, morally, to feed, cloth, and house people who choose to work the system instead of a job? No, Americans do not spend wisely, that toothpaste is out of the tube; Americans have figured out what deToqueville warned against, that they can vote to use the Treasury to give themselves "free" stuff. National healthcare, run by Washington bureaucrats, scares the heck out of me.
Maybe if the middle class understood that the national debt is going to be solely their responsibility they might get angry enough to get involved.
Someday, the national debt will come due. Who will pay it back?
Not the poor, they don't have any money.
And not the rich. The rich will say, "We make up only 5% of the population (or 2%, depending on how you define "rich") why should we pay off a debt that was run up by 100% of the population?"
And then the rich will drop out of the economy and live off their wealth, leaving the middle class - and the middle class alone - tens of trillions of dollars in the hole.
Moral of the story: the national debt is a middle-class debt.
grumpysloth website linked to does not seem to be working.
Drives me absolutely nuts when our leftist/communists complain about the non-rich "voting against their own interests." Their attitude says, "Hey, there's room at the trough! Get your snout in here! (and vote for me!)"
I guess gvt-driven stealing isn't really stealing, right?
If you are looking to the government to solve problems, you are looking in the wrong place!!
The government CANNOT provide better health care, so quit asking it to do so. The ONLY place where problems are actually solved is the private sector. The only thing the government can do is warp the rules to give priority to some segment of the population to access that is above some other segment of the population. Government does not invent drugs, create new treatments, or even do research... it FUNDS these things in the most inefficient manner possible. And the government takes a cut of all money passing through its fingers.
You blast conservatives about health care, but you are dead wrong!! The problem is government and government officials... and fools like you that believe in them. If you think national health care would be wonderful, just look at those systems in Canada and the UK. In both of those systems, getting to see a doctor, or even a nurse-practitioner, takes forever. And people die waiting for treatments. People are not dying in the U.S. because they cannot get to see a practitioner... they have financial issues because they have to pay for some things. In a government-run system, the practitioners are not paid well, which drives them out of medicine, and treatment is rationed, leading to unnecessary misery and death. It is all about controlling costs, not providing quality care. Bureaucrats that provide no added value are in there to take a salary, cutting into the available money. If you think it's better, I suggest you move there for a few years... but don't get a serious illness, as you won't be able to come back.
As for mental health care, it is widely available for both employed and unemployed. Those who are not employed or not employable can get health care (medical and mental health) at taxpayer expense through various agencies. The problem is that many do not seek help and reject the treatment offered. Sometimes they take the medicine for a short while, then stop. Since treatment cannot be forced upon them, except in very rare circumstances, they go back to their ways (homelessness) without treatment. Many homeless reject help with a home, because they don't want to live by the rules of those who want to help them (e.g. no drugs, treatment plans).
Self-employed health insurance IS expensive, but it's available. Allowing insurance through other groups, like associations for certain fields (accounting, farm coops, retail, etc) would help, but that seems to be available in only a few states.
If you want to fix things, get the Progressives and Marxists out of government at every level. Marxism only leads to corruption and death. In the 20'th century, Marxism was responsible for the deaths of 300,000,000+ people. In my lifetime (almost 70 years), we have NEVER seen a smaller government in America. Maybe we should try that once. Maybe we should actually try capitalism, just once, since that hasn't been the way for America in over 100 years. We agree on one thing... get rid of all these garbage social programs! But we DO NOT have the money to do any of what you suggest we spend money on. We are over $200T in debt, that will NEVER be paid off, especially if we go do what you suggest.
The deep cultural problem the USA has is lack of personal responsibility. We have had decades of "education" that says that the world owes you something, just because you are able to breathe and it is ALWAYS someone else's fault. And everything should be "free". Free healthcare, free college (never mind that 2/3 of adults do NOT go to college and they, on average, make far less than those with college degrees), free food, free housing, free money... all kinds of "free stuff" from the government coffers.
We have people who believe that there should be a government mandated "minimum" amount you time is worth, which is absolutely not true. Your time is worth what you put into it and bring to the workplace. If your effort is worth $2/hr, that's what you should be paid. If your effort is worth $1,000/hr, that's what you should be paid. And the government has no business sticking it's nose into the arrangement. If a potential employer doesn't pay you what you believe you are worth, there are other employers (and, for the employers, other employees). On the other hand, if you "contract" for a certain compensation and the employer fails to deliver after you delivered for them, that is a matter for the courts.
We have a culture that believes money provided through the federal government is "free", so states and municipalities spend if freely, with no thoughts about where that money really came from. I've seen this first-hand, as an employee of a state university, where the department head says something like: we have to spend $30,000 by the end of next month... what should we buy?
If you want healthcare that is not attached (note you said attacked) to your job, then work to get the insurance laws, regulations, and companies to include both individual policies (which I believe are available everywhere) or attached to a group of some sort (e.g. coop, association, club, neighborhood, church, etc) that you can join to negotiate lower premiums or better coverage. Insurance works this way... the insurance company is pooling costs from a lot of people (the group) and determines a risk assessment. From there, they determine how much each member of the group should pay into the "kitty" to cover costs incurred by members. Most insurance companies are incorporated as non-profit organizations. There are organizations that pool health care costs and are not considered insurance companies (e.g. https://www.onesharehealth.com/en/). I've never been part of one, but I've heard people who are part of one talk about it on radio programs. By the way, a lot of health insurance policies are "self-insured" employer plans, which means the employer pays a company to administer a plan, but all the health costs are paid by the employer, with a combination of employer funds and employee contributions to be included in the plan.
I'm not going to defend crooked politicians, but if you want more government, you are asking for more crooked politicians. And there are many of those. There are also a lot of crooked bureaucrats, who are probably WORSE than the politicians, because the politicians CAN be removed from office, while the bureaucrats cannot.
If you are going to complain about insurance companies, though, you should complain about the WORST of those, which is Medicare. With an insurance company, there is someone to call and complain to when a claim is denied, but not Medicare. If you can't get the insurance company to do something they should, you have 2 more roads to recourse: the insurance commissioner and the courts. Neither of those is available to you with Medicare. Believe me, you DO NOT want what you would get with "Medicare for All".
As for the "lockdown" and people left with no healthcare, there are two causes: 1) the government organization that put the employer out of business and had to let people go; 2) the government that created the abomination called Obamacare (a/k/a "The Affordable Healthcare Act", which is anything but). Remember that Obamacare a) forced people into plans for which there were no healthcare providers near them; b) forced people to buy insurance they could not afford OR pay a penalty for not buying the insurance they could not afford.
As for reduction in the size of government, I will repeat myself by pointing out that the size of government has NEVER gotten smaller, under any administration, because the f-ing Demoncrats have engineered the system to make that impossible. Even with the most conservative administrations of Reagan and Trump, the size of government went up. When they have a "government shutdown", only 17% of government is affected, because the rest of it is "essential" and cannot be stopped. And there is a lot of those "useless garbage social programs" you mentioned earlier. It's the f-ing Demoncrats and RINO "Republicans" that keep the gravy train driving power and money into their own coffers.
In case you are interested, since 1932, the Republicans have controlled Congress for a total of 14 years, while the Democrats have controlled Congress for a total of 56 years (4 times as long as Republicans). Other years were split between the two parties.
The only way to fix this country is to pass a Constitutional Amendment that: a) wipes out ALL government programs; b) limits the spending to what the government can take in; and c) strictly limits what the government can take from citizens and businesses, without the approval of a 3/4 majority of state legislatures and that approval limited to a single year. We need to repeal the 17th amendment, which took the selection of members of the U.S. Senate from the state legislatures to a popular vote, leaving the state legislatures without recourse to control the members of the senate. The original configuration provided the House to represent the people of the country and the Senate to represent the States. The 17th amendment separated the state governments from the Congress, which now imposes rules on the states without consideration of the effect on the state governments.
Along with useless programs, we have entirely useless departments that regulate things the federal government should not be involved in. Department of Energy, Department of Commerce, Department of Education, Department of Health and Human Services... all unconstitutional interference in states' responsibilities. And then there's the Department of Homeland Security, which is anything and everything but homeland security. Read the 10th Amendment...
"Conservatives are so dumb..." Well at least I'm not as dumb as progressives who think government is the answer to everything. You want to bang on the US for having cultural problems and poor education? Well the clue phone is ringing, why not pick it up and see who has been driving the bus towards personal irresponsibility, no accounting to God at judgment day, CRT, gender confusion and the victim mentality, identity politics, and the whole "everybody owes me a living, simply because I'm here, irregardless of whether I've lifted a darn finger to earn it." (Or whether I'm even here legally, right?) Jesus said; "if you don't work, you don't eat." How does that put me on the hook, morally, to feed, cloth, and house people who choose to work the system instead of a job? No, Americans do not spend wisely, that toothpaste is out of the tube; Americans have figured out what deToqueville warned against, that they can vote to use the Treasury to give themselves "free" stuff. National healthcare, run by Washington bureaucrats, scares the heck out of me.