We have been discussing how mean=spirited and nasty the presidential campaign has already become on both sides. With Republicans called Obama a socialist and a Muslim, Democrats are saying Romney would not have killed Bin Laden . . . and now that he is vampiric.
The new ad, “Steel” describes GS Technologies, a steel mill in Kansas City, Mo., that was bought by Romney’s private equity firm Bain Capital. One former mill worker says “We view Mitt Romney as a job destroyer, a vampire. They came in and sucked the life out of us.” “Mitt the Job Destroyer” is still better than “Vlad the Impaler” but they seem to be saying that he is both.
The question is how strong the anti-vampire vote is. After all, Obama is no Buffy The Vampire Slayer himself, but then again who is?
Before the Republicans denounce the ad, they should consider that there could be some positive aspects to an undead president for the GOP:
1. They work nights.
2. They truly can take the bite out of crime.
3. They are always taking the pulse of voters.
5. One meeting of the Group of Eight would leave a group of one.
6. The GOP would finally secure the Goth vote.
7. We would finally have a president who is all bite and no bark.
8. Republicans can re-use those “Drill, Baby, Drill” signs.
9. No one is more anti-evolution than a vampire.
10. Perfect for the slogan, “Better Undead than Red.”
Source: Washington Post
Come on. Spout some more of your “greed is good” dogma, Bron. It is what is expected of you instead of addressing the fundamental structural and logical flaws in your arguments (such as they are). You go right on ahead and ignore the indirect taxation that disproportionately impacts the poor and middle class and focus on income tax all you like. I’ll just point out loopholes exploited by the ultra rich and corporations to avoid paying their fair share or in some cases any taxes at all. Why don’t you instead go back to proving Elaine and Tony wrong instead of ignoring your blatant attempt to shift the burden of proof.
Your love of money is simply staggering as well as being one of your principle character traits. It’s also something else. The root of something. What is that again? Oh yeah. All evil.
I’m not interested in dancing with you today, Randy. I pointed out the flaws in your arguments. Either address them or don’t.
that should read top 40% instead of top 20% above.
Gene H:
“As to where the money comes from? I know exactly where it comes (the poor and middle class)”
I would love to see those statistics because the statistics I see say the top 20% of income earners pay about 80% of the taxes.
Spare me you concern for the poor and the middle class. If you had any at all you would want them to be productive and have high wages which is only possible with a good economy. Countries with socialist economies typically have high unemployment and very little upward mobility.
Argument by non-sequitur and anecdote (that – btw – reveals your personal bias and vested interest) as well as shifting the burden of proof. They presented their proof. If you wish to rebut it, the burden of proof to counter rests on you.
Gene:
I am sure people have gone bankrupt due to medical bills. But people go bankrupt all the time for many reasons. Some go bankrupt because they owe $20,000 in credit card debt.
Personally I have been screwed by people who went bankrupt to avoid creditors and it had nothing to due with medical bills. So excuse me if I dont think $26,000 in debt is worth going bankrupt over. They use the medical bills as an excuse and Elizabeth Warren et al are using these bankruptcies as a reason for national health care. So their bias cannot be ignored.
As I said I would like to see the actual study, which as of today no one has provided.
I get provided with an LA Times article which says that medical expenses are a contributing factor, how much of a factor? It also begs a good many questions, did they try and set up a payment plan, what is the percentage of medical debt, what is the percentage of other debt, how much has the Obama economy contributed to the necessity of the bankruptcy action. I could probably think of a number of other reasons but I want to get some sun.
“first I do not have a delusion that no government is good, never had and never will. That is your delusional Red Herring. Some government is necessary.
Secondly people have value in and of themselves, they are not wards of the state as you and others seem to think.”
Straw man. That’s not what I said. What I said was it interferes with the delusion that people will obey rules without enforcement (emphasis added for the hard of understanding) and requires that you acknowledge people have a value beyond what you can personally gain from them in your Objectivist selfishness. I don’t think people are wards of the state. I think the state should exist to serve all the people. If you are so concerned about people’s intrinsic value it sure doesn’t show in your willingness to let business exploit them for profit.
As to where the money comes from? I know exactly where it comes (the poor and middle class) from and where it should come from but doesn’t (the wealthy and corporations). As usual, your response is as predicted. You doubled down on your dogma. Congratulations on your consistency, hobgoblin.
“1) it interferes with the delusion that people will obey rules without enforcement and 2) requires that you acknowledge people have a value beyond what you can personally gain from them in your Objectivist selfishness.”
first I do not have a delusion that no government is good, never had and never will. That is your delusional Red Herring. Some government is necessary.
Secondly people have value in and of themselves, they are not wards of the state as you and others seem to think.
You are a silly man, you want government to pay for every ailment of man but refuse to acknowledge the money comes from individuals. It is you who has no regard for individuals and it is you who see others as only a means of serving society.
To paraphrase, slightly, Frederic Bastiat:
“The more one examines these “forward looking” socialists and their school of thought, the more one is convinced that at bottom they rest on nothing but ignorance proclaiming itself infallible and demanding despotic power in the name of this infallibility.”
that was a partisan study done by at least one doctrinaire liberal, Elizabeth Warren, which came to a conclusion they wanted to come to because they want national health care. The article didnt discuss methodology or anything else. Show me the actual study.
Tony C. And Elaine,
Bron doesn’t worry about those fact thingies.
Bron,
I want a government that works for “We the People”, not for “We the Corporate” or “We the Oligarchical Greedy”. If you can’t tell the difference between pure political water and piss, it might be because you’ve been dining on a steady diet of Objectivist filth for so long your taste buds are ruined. The flip side of the coin in sacrificing the state of absolute liberty that exists in the state of nature in the social compact is mutually derived benefit. I seek to maximize that benefit. You, on the other hand, seem to have a real hard time understanding the concept because 1) it interferes with the delusion that people will obey rules without enforcement and 2) requires that you acknowledge people have a value beyond what you can personally gain from them in your Objectivist selfishness.
Tony and Elaine have not done anything that hasn’t been done to you 1,000 time over here: people prove you wrong and you ignore it. Ignoring facts is the root of all ignorance, Bron. Although I will stipulate that both are very gifted amateurs, that they aren’t even trained in social engineering (because that is what law is) and in argumentation (as I am) should make you question the validity of your premises even more.
It won’t.
Instead, as we’ve all seen before and expect you to do at this point, you’ll likely double-down when bested by argument and evidence and spout some more of your Randian/Libertarian dogma without question.
You don’t succeed in proving points and very often your attempts to make them are poor at best. You say you aren’t here to change other’s minds.
Then why exactly are you here?
You once said your original intent coming to this blog was to “piss off some liberals”.
If your motive isn’t to prove your positions right, is your motive really as childishly simply as that?
I’ve asked you before and I ask you again.
What do you get out of this?
Tony C.,
Bron said:
“Show me, in the last 100 years, a large number of people losing everything because of illness. I am sure there are some but the statistics would prove you are channeling Chicken Little.’
We did…and it was disregarded.
@Bron: I knew you would say that. You only listen to people telling you what you want to hear. Any study that says anything you do NOT want to hear you will dismiss out of hand. I only posted it so others can see the depth of your ignorance and the extent of your willingness to outright lie.
The problem the Aynishee cannot solve are the free riders, which they cannot solve because they yearn to be them. Their only solution is the pathetic plea that some people (but not them) will voluntary pay for the government out of charitable leanings (which they do not have) and civic duty (which they do not feel).
If it isn’t free riders, it is going to be some complex interlocking pay-for-protection scheme, but they never seem to realize that when your protectors are only it for personal gain, they will sell you out to the highest bidder. So you want to sue them? Go ahead and try, because the cops and justice system, in their scheme, are also for-profit organizations that will also sell you out to the highest bidder, ad infinitum. The same thing goes for laws against murder, theft and fraud: If you can’t pay, they go unpunished, because the cops and courts will cost you money.
So there will be no justice anywhere, but the rich will get everything they want without restriction, because they can always be the highest bidder.
you want to steal peoples money, then have them dependent on government which then gives them back the money they [government] took from them in the first place.
That is like pissing on me and then giving me water to wash the piss off that shouldnt have been there in the first place. And expecting me to be grateful you gave me the water.
Looked at another way, you could say those poor people were so burdened with taxes they could not put money aside for a rainy day. Which is probably closer to the truth.
Americans are not good savers so what do your expect when an illness arises? Some of them have been told to file for bankruptcy by their lawyers and some figured the government was going to bale them out.
I dont believe that study fully comprehends the root causes nor do I think it comes to the right conclusion, we need less government not more and people need to start learning how to take responsibility for their own lives and not expect society to bail them out of a jam.
$20,000 is a lot of money but if you put yourself on a payment plan and go bare bones for a couple of years it is payable.
The problem is not the illness, the problem is not understanding money and the burden of taxes of all sorts on the middle class which prevents them from saving for a rainy day.
Why dont you give those people a 5 year tax holiday from all local, state and federal taxes so they can pay off their debts and put some money aside for the future?
If a person owns a house and a car and makes $35,000 per year you are probably talking somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 and if you threw in the employer portion of SS and the other payroll taxes you would add an additional $2,200 per year. So a person with a tax holiday could have, as a minimum, around $38,000 of additional income over a 5 year period. According to the study, that would just about take care of it and maybe the person would have $10,000 – $15,000 left to put into a rainy day fund.
More taxes arent the answer, less taxes and more personal responsibility is the answer to medical bankruptcies.
By the way that article didnt tell me anything except that it is partisan. I want to see raw data, that study is very subjective.
Plaintiff challenging healthcare law went bankrupt – with unpaid medical bills
Obama administration lawyers say her case is an example of why an insurance mandate is needed to prevent ‘uncompensated care that will ultimately be paid by others.’
March 08, 2012|By David G. Savage, Los Angeles Times
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/08/nation/la-na-healthcare-plaintiff-20120309
Excerpt:
Reporting from Washington — Mary Brown, a 56-year-old Florida woman who owned a small auto repair shop but had no health insurance, became the lead plaintiff challenging President Obama’s healthcare law because she was passionate about the issue.
Brown “doesn’t have insurance. She doesn’t want to pay for it. And she doesn’t want the government to tell her she has to have it,” said Karen Harned, a lawyer for the National Federation of Independent Business. Brown is a plaintiff in the federation’s case, which the Supreme Court plans to hear later this month.
But court records reveal that Brown and her husband filed for bankruptcy last fall with $4,500 in unpaid medical bills. Those bills could change Brown from a symbol of proud independence into an example of exactly the problem the healthcare law was intended to address.
Bron,
I understand perfectly well that governments can be tyrannical. It’s one of my favorite topics. I also understand there are ways to engineer government to avert and/or minimize that problem. The bottom line is government must be coercive at a certain level to operate because laws without enforcement are suggestions. This is something every serious student of political science knows to be the reality of the situation. You cannot change it. It is a fundamental of social organization at scale. Every lawyer here knows this and it is evident as a matter of basic logic. Rules without enforcement are not actually rules. Your failure to acknowledge that business can be just as tyrannical as any government is a reflection of your blind devotion to your Objectivist fantasy of free markets as a mechanism for justice. If the laws interfere with your lust for profits? As long as they serve a valid social function (promote justice, promote public safety and/or health, prevent or remedy damage to others by bad actors, etc.), that’s just too bad. That you choose to worship an ideal that is absurd in its foundation – based on a completely unrealistic view of human nature and unworkable in real world application – is a reflection of your bad choice(s). You yourself acknowledge that government is necessary. Well, bad news, coercion is the enforcement part of law enforcement. This applies to any system of government. The answer to reducing tyranny isn’t free market models because those models lead to one place: tyranny of the strong over the weak. The answer to reducing tyranny is in creating greater – i.e. more responsive – democracy, engineering government to make abuses difficult in the extreme and providing for punishments so severe for abusing office or buying influence for personal gain becomes a repugnant option (I think those who peddle graft and those who take it should be subject to long prison sentences, asset forfeiture and bans on holding public office or stand as a corporate officer for life), and holding everyone subject to the rule of law be they President, pauper, CEO or shoe salesman. The solution to bad government isn’t no government.
It’s better government and the pursuit of justice.
Bron,
I agree with Tony C.
Medical bills prompt more than 60 percent of U.S. bankruptcies
HEALTH INSURANCE
June 05, 2009|By Theresa Tamkins
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-06-05/health/bankruptcy.medical.bills_1_medical-bills-bankruptcies-health-insurance?_s=PM:HEALTH
Excerpt:
This year, an estimated 1.5 million Americans will declare bankruptcy. Many people may chalk up that misfortune to overspending or a lavish lifestyle, but a new study suggests that more than 60 percent of people who go bankrupt are actually capsized by medical bills.
Bankruptcies due to medical bills increased by nearly 50 percent in a six-year period, from 46 percent in 2001 to 62 percent in 2007, and most of those who filed for bankruptcy were middle-class, well-educated homeowners, according to a report that will be published in the August issue of The American Journal of Medicine.
“Unless you’re a Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, you’re one illness away from financial ruin in this country,” says lead author Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., of the Harvard Medical School, in Cambridge, Mass. “If an illness is long enough and expensive enough, private insurance offers very little protection against medical bankruptcy, and that’s the major finding in our study.”
@Bron: Show me, in the last 100 years, a large number of people losing everything because of illness. I am sure there are some but the statistics would prove you are channeling Chicken Little.
Read This.
About half of all bankruptcies in the USA are the result of a serious illness; that is about two million medical bankruptcies a year. Most of them were middle class, most of them had insurance when their illness was first diagnosed.
I, too, am quite familiar with hospitals; I worked in a very large hospital for three years, I met my wife there, she still works there twenty plus years later, and I hear all about what is going on, all the time.
I only think government is out to rip me off. Show me where I think people are ripping me off? I make informed decisions and calculate the worth/cost of something to me as everyone should. If you are talking about Pawn Shops, they are definitely ripping off the poor but they can because they are heavily controlled by government.
Show me, in the last 100 years, a large number of people losing everything because of illness. I am sure there are some but the statistics would prove you are channeling Chicken Little.
I dont know many, if any, doctors who would deny service to a dying man, you are out of line to suggest they would.
I am convinced that if medical care was forced to operate in a free market with minimal regulations, the care would be superior and the cost would be quite reasonable. Government has caused the loss of countless millions of lives because of excessive regulations and road blocks to drug and new medical procedure approvals at the FDA [Federal Death Agency]. Let people have the chance with the knowledge that the treatment might not work or might harm them. Let them make the choice, let them be free.
You and your collectivist buddies are the ones with the appalling, sick philosophy.
The guy from Facebook renounced his US citizenship to save his money from the tax man. And I say good for him, he is only the beginning if this shit keeps up. More are going to follow him and good for them. It is their money, they earned it and are morally entitled to it, they dont owe me health care or a job.
So maybe the youth of America see collectivism in all its many forms for the worthless, human life hating philosophy it actually is.
There are 3 million millionaires in this country only 30% of them inherited the money, the rest earned it by hard work, perseverance and probably intelligence. The 99% [probably more like 30%] is a misnomer, I am not part of the 1% but I definitely say the 30% can get off their ass and get a job and try to improve their lot in life rather than hoping government will make the 70% pay their way.