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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Human beings largely object to income inequality and are willing to correct injustice—unless, of course, it rattles their status quo.
That's the conclusion of a recent study looking at how far people would go to redistribute resources between the haves and have nots. Participants fiercely objected to "when winners become losers and losers become winners," researchers note in the paper, published in the latest issue of Nature Human Behaviour.
Researchers initially recruited Indian, American, and Chinese participants take part in an experimental game they called "the redistribution game." The gist of the game was simple: Participants were given a number of scenarios that would redistribute a fixed sum from a richer person to someone poorer. Participants were told the original standing of wealth was assigned randomly.
In the first scenario, participants had to decide if they wanted to transfer two coins from person A (who already had four coins) to person B (who had one). Researchers note the "transfer would reduce inequality," (as there's less of a gap between them), but person B would end up one coin richer than person A, reversing their status.
In the second version of game, participants were asked whether they'd transfer one coin to person B (where person A ended up with three coins and person B with two coins). Researchers ran a third and fourth scenario that allowed participants to transfer coins from person A to B, where the outcome still left person A with significantly more coins.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 16 2017, @07:02AM (4 children)
Sales tax isn't necessarily regressive. It gets that bad rap when people assume that it's a one-size-fits-all across-the-board tax, but that's rarely how it is implemented. In actual fact (whether you're talking GST or VAT or some other concoction) there are usually exemptions for precisely the things poor people buy. So there's that.
A complicating factor of course is that the same people who complain about sales taxes, and regressive taxes, and regressive sales taxes are usually first in line to propose duties on financial transfers - despite the evidence that slowing the markets is actually more likely to induce crashes and imbalances, than less.
On the one hand you say "It's also fair to say that taxes would generally be higher for most people." which is quite worrying, since "most people" necessarily includes a lot of people who aren't that well off, and then: "Yet this would be partially or even mostly offset for the working and middle class because two huge expenses would be eliminated or heavily reduced: education and healthcare." which is even more worrying, because now you're saying that everyone over some cutoff is somehow paying the way for everyone else - a massive, and massively concentrated burden, but at the same time you won't actually put a conceptual cap on tax, beyond what people will vote for.
How do you escape the proverbial trap of running out of other people's money? Answer as yet absent.
Also, addressing the voting concept - you don't explain how you'll get people to vote for a set of policies that so far they show no inclination whatsoever to go for. As popular as Bernie looked, he evidently had major problems when you count up the real numbers.
Ironic that you would declare unilaterally that markets don't work for health care, when the market, as far as it goes, for health care in the USA is one of the most openly, vastly distorted one can think of, by government action. Ranging from forced compliance of providers with a whole list of dictates, both practical and financial, to active support of rent-seeking groups, through flat-out creation of monopolies - the USA is simply not an example of that thesis. And, as sheer fortune would have it, in The Economist: (https://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2017/07/senate-s-health-bill)
So ... no. Not only does your thesis fall at the first hurdle, as not being applicable, the simple declaration that the butter can be spread on the bread doesn't explain how the result will be adequate, much less feasible. Stating flatly that it is a catastrophe isn't persuasive without some kind of reference point. Sudan? Afghanistan? Chechnya?
Your statement that health care should be nationalised appears to fly in the face of the experiences who've suffered under it, and don't like the results. The USA is actually a medical tourism destination precisely because, as broken as it is, it's not nationalised..
I'll broadly concede that governments are better at prestige projects, but I'll utterly refute the idea that it's a prerequisite for big research leaps, and given the track record of things like DARPA grants, it's mostly good at bogging things down. Once in a while something like the internet escapes the monkey house, but that's rare.
"Social democrats don't want to see capitalism replaced, they want to see it rehabilitated." That sounds all warm and fuzzy, but the things that you're mentioning are very worrisome. Norway has a very well-documented problem with institutionalised risk aversion to the point that their sovereign fund, that's supposed (among other things) to invest in norwegian entrepreneurialism can't actually find enough norwegian entrepreneurs to boost. Boosting taxes on the wealthiest is likely to drive capital away (a well-documented problem as well - notoriously look at the business refusing to repatriate profits for just one example), nationalising health care doesn't promise to improve it and in fact shows every sign of being apt to wreck it. Even the tightening grip of Medicaid is driving more doctors out of the profession right now to the point that, what with the AMA's stranglehold on further training, there's a serious replenishment problem.
Right now climate change appears to all plausible measurements to be under way, but the book is definitely not written on the causes nor the consequences. Dictating any one course of action is apt to be counterproductive at this point. You call on the example of Brazil, but Brazil is famous for having a lot more centralised economic decision-making and more dictatorial industrial policy than the USA, so if Brazil will make decisions you don't like (assuming the anthropogenic narrative, such as it is, is both detailed and perfect, which it is clearly not) why should you believe that any or every other country would, just because they like social democracy?
As they say in Scotland: case not proven.
(Score: 2) by julian on Sunday July 16 2017, @08:33AM (3 children)
You overdignify Thatcher's thought terminating cliché by elevating it to a proverb. Anyone who uses this phrase is dealing in the currency of facile political slogans, not meaningful ideas. I reject the premises implied by the question.
Your passages about health care are, bluntly, either false or where they are true reveal a disturbing indifference to human suffering. A healthcare system that only covers those capable of paying is not among the candidates of acceptable solutions. It does not meet the minimum standards to be considered. It is a moral obscenity. I have no more obligation to rebut it than I do the proposal that cannibalism is sound agricultural policy.
We see employed also the old trick of never assigning to capitalism the failures of capitalism, and never assigning to socialist policy the successes of socialism; keeping two sets of books.
That's rounded off with a lot of "just so" hand-waving and procedural quibbling under the absurd premise that every single failure in every other similar country would be replicated, simultaneously, here. As if we could learn nothing.
And if that wasn't enough you're an anonymous climate change skeptic. Although, at least one sharp enough to realize it's unacceptable to come right out and say so. I've already spent more time replying than your comment deserved and no more will follow.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 16 2017, @10:59AM (1 child)
What successes of socialism?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 16 2017, @07:03PM
Here we find the willfully ignorant turd floating in the sink. Now, you may want to argue, make rational arguments, generally use reason to overcome our differences.
But the don't lose track of the most important question, who craps in a sink?? Retards, that's who.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 16 2017, @05:03PM
"You overdignify Thatcher's thought terminating cliché by elevating it to a proverb. Anyone who uses this phrase is dealing in the currency of facile political slogans, not meaningful ideas. I reject the premises implied by the question."
Answer not given. What limits are provided in the system where everyone below the very top tier, as per your prior post, comes out ahead? You can only soak the rich so much, and since they're a tiny minority, you have to bleed them hard to get much at all.
So: how would you determine what you would presumably describe as a fair tax, and how would you differentiate it from an unfair one? Verifiable metrics, not warm fuzzies.
"Your passages about health care are, bluntly, either false or where they are true reveal a disturbing indifference to human suffering. A healthcare system that only covers those capable of paying is not among the candidates of acceptable solutions. It does not meet the minimum standards to be considered. It is a moral obscenity. I have no more obligation to rebut it than I do the proposal that cannibalism is sound agricultural policy."
Didn't propose anything of the sort. Pointed out that the USA doesn't have anything even resembling a free market in health care - and even so the outcomes, where financially supportable, are world-class. If the problem is one of distribution, please explain which bathwater you will throw out and which babies will have to go with it.
"We see employed also the old trick of never assigning to capitalism the failures of capitalism, and never assigning to socialist policy the successes of socialism; keeping two sets of books."
I assign all sorts of failure to capitalism - but it was social democracy that was under discussion. If you want to differentiate the two by comparison, feel free. But explain not merely your goals, but also your methods - because as illustrated, there are massive problems with the methods at which you hint.
"That's rounded off with a lot of "just so" hand-waving and procedural quibbling under the absurd premise that every single failure in every other similar country would be replicated, simultaneously, here. As if we could learn nothing."
Fine. What have you learned, and what would you change? I promise to read every word. Probably a couple of times, and analyse carefully. The floor is yours.
"And if that wasn't enough you're an anonymous climate change skeptic. Although, at least one sharp enough to realize it's unacceptable to come right out and say so. I've already spent more time replying than your comment deserved and no more will follow."
I'm sceptical of many things. In some cases, I've been proven right, in others wrong. That's life. But I don't accept because I said so from anyone purporting to be a scientist - and that includes climate scientists. There are serious open questions about positive and negative feedback loops, interactions with independent variables and the rate of change.
... but you're taking your rhetorical ball home and sulking rather than actually defending your position. Fair enough.
Case still not proven, and given that the advocate rests his case, I think that one gets swept away. Next, please?