"I'll try ̶s̶p̶i̶n̶n̶i̶n̶g̶ printing more money, that's a good trick!"
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
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Your credit limit is higher, but not infinite. As the US national debt goes up, the interest rates that the government must pay also go up. This creates an exponential rise in the cost of the debt which eventually starts to crowd out the budget. Service on the national debt is projected to be $580 billion this year, up from $375 billion in 2019. Any shocks to the system could cause that number to spike, creating a downward spiral as the US credit dries up and interest rates force austerity and tax hikes.
Clinton wanted to spend. It wasn't up to him. Gingrich and the R Congress are the reason the budget was balanced in the 90s. Presidents don't control the budget.
Of course you are right that the Democrats portrayed themselves as victims as a rationalization for blowing out the spending on paying off their supporters and buying votes. All the "inflation reduction act" did was dump hundreds of billions in subsidies on "green new deal" environmentalist bullshit.
Both parties want to max out the federal credit card to deny the other party the ability to "spend" more, only the Rs do it with tax cuts, which isn't spending at all, it's simply taxing less. Both parties give 0 fucks about the national debt because the voters give 0 fucks because the voters are stupid and don't care or understand the danger. So we are going to charge full speed into fiscal crisis so all the idiots can learn the hard way. By the time the danger becomes clear, it will be too late to avoid it.
The main problem is that the US health care system isn't a free market system. It's a cartel set up between the insurers and hospitals to fuck over everyone else. Hospitals get special legal benefits so they can avoid competition. Insurers get the same. Both collude to make being uninsured too dangerous because the hospitals charge assfuck inflated prices to uninsureds.
Laws which force hospitals to publish and honor all their prices are a big step in the right direction. Consumers in the US have absolutely no way to comparison shop for health care, and both the hospitals and the insurers want to keep it that way because it benefits them both.
The answer, as always, is deregulation, taking health care policy away from states to form a singular national market instead of 50 state markets, elimination of probably 90% of health care insurance regulation so the free market can actually function, and forcing hospitals to compete with one another by forcing them to publish prices and giving consumers the right to pick cheaper hospitals and save money.
The reason for all this collusion is to keep doctors, nurses, and health administration staff rich. The reason health care is so expensive in the US is to pay all these grossly overpaid people disgustingly high amounts of money.
Nobody has the balls to create a free market in any rich country because the plebians demand gibs, so socialist health care is the norm. Of all such systems, Japan is the least bad because the government pays 70% and tells you to fuck off for the remaining 30%, so at least in that situation, there is still an incentive by the consumer to price shop and get the best value for the best price.
The fact that despite this, the dollar is now dominating the euro is quite depressing to me - and depressing to my purchasing power. You can literally print as much as you want and still you're beating us. If Japan can survive with 200%+ national debt, I think the US can with its reserve currency boondoggle (not advocatng for it).
They shut down the government and they lost. So clearly, they came to some sort of understanding. You can't pin the blame or the credit on one party or the other. Most likely, it's just because it's less easy to agree on more spending when there is actually some opposition.
It's incredible to me. They just paste labels on laws that have nothing to do with them. Patriot Act, and now this. And then they have to gall to say that their "INflation Reduction Act" was the most significant action against climate change in history. And no one calls them out.
I'm sure you'll view this as a Eurofag bashing America again, but in all honesty, your media is even worse than ours. I'd say about 3 times as bad. Here they at least pretend to do some critical scrutiny of the powers that be.
But both parties don't give a damn about what "voters" think. As everywhere. So there must be some other reason.
This seems like something that no reasonable person, left or right, can oppose.
It sure as hell wasn't the answer to banking. Or Big Tech.
But most consumers are insured. So why would they care about the cost? When I am picking health care plans, I can pick between plans that allow me to get treatment in all hospitals, or just most. I'm always willing to pay a bit more to get all hospitals, even though there are several hospitals in the city where I live that are covered anyway. You never know...
I have heard about that numerus clausus that the AMA pushes. Supposedly to safeguard quality. Of course, then they pick doctors based on race, so it's not really about quality, is it?
Not letting people die is not really a 'gibs', is it? I wouldn't want to live somewhere if people who earned less were simply left to die because a grocery store employee is considered less valuable than a VP of Diversity of Inclusion.
Now if we empirically examine the health care system in Japan, is it better than Europe and America in practice as well as on paper for you?
This is because as much as the Democrats assfucked our economy, the Euros did worse, because at least we have the Republicans to resist and rein things in somewhat. If it wasn't for Joe Manchin holding them back, Biden would have spent 4 trillion on 1 bill instead of under 1 trillion.
The Euros also locked down harder and tanked their economies because they didn't have red state governors like Ron DeSantis telling Joe Biden to fuck off.
Japan is a special and unique case because it is an ethnostate with a strong collectivist culture. The result of that is that the Japanese private citizens sacrifice by lending their money to the Japanese government at NEGATIVE interest rates in order to sustain Japan's otherwise unsustainable welfare state. Americans and Euros would never do that. The Japanese people buy government bonds like it's a form of charity.
No, the Republicans did not "lose", they got a balanced budget. They just had to compromise on some things and didn't get everything they wanted, which is how politics works. Clinton and the Democrats wanted more spending and more taxes. The Republicans wanted less of both, so you can't give the Democrats any credit. They were the problem and the Republicans were the solution.
It sickens me when Democrats try to take credit for fiscal responsibility. That's like a rapist trying to take credit for not raping you because the police [republicans] arrived in time to stop him.
Patriot Act is exactly the name you'd expect for Authright legislation, though.
The right wing media calls them out, but as far as the liberal media? Of course not, they're all Democrat operatives.
Bashing the libtard media in the US is not bashing America. Your comments obviously do not apply to things like Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire, or other conservative outlets like Tucker Carlson.
The Democrats see voters as sheep to be manipulated. The Republicans see the Democrats as communists they need to protect the common people against by red pilling them on Democrat insanity. I think the Republicans in the present year care far more about what the voters want, which is why we are getting a red wave.
But in the past have there been times where the republican party got corrupted by special interests? Such as on China and illegal immigration? Yes. When the republicans gain too much power for too long, as they did in the GWB years, they got fat and corrupt and wasted a lot of money. That's why the voters turned against them and put Obama for 8 years.
I agree. I think the government should ban all the deceptive tactics businesses use to conceal and manipulate their pricing information. When I try to book plane tickets and hotels, I constantly have to deal with hidden fee bullshit. Google flights and Google hotels tries to include fees, but hotels routinely, for example, charge "resort fees" that are not optional and are very expensive at $50/night or more. Airlines like Spirit Airlines are absolute assholes about trying to upcharge you with hidden fees and lying about things like tax charges. It's infuriating and makes it 10x harder to get the best deal when these fucks can lie to you.
It would be child's play to simply ban these tactics and pass a law that says "you're not allowed to charge any extra fees and must give a single, all-inclusive price in all your advertisement, period."
Also bear in mind that the government easily could have stopped spam calls by passing a regulation that bans phone number spoofing, and yet it's taken years for them to slowly get around to it.
This is one area [consumer protection] where the EU sometimes pulls ahead, mostly because they have no loyalty to US companies who are the primary culprits of a lot of these practices.
The 1 time regulation is required is when capitalism cannot function because you're dealing with a natural monopoly or cartel. Big Tech is natural monopolies. Banking is a big different. While there are only a handful of big banks and they sometimes act like a cartel, there are also a lot of smaller banks and credit unions, so it's pretty easy for you to not do business with big banks if you don't want to. That isn't an option with Big Tech.
It matters. Even if only 5% of consumers are actually engaging in price discrimination, these people [like me, I'm uninsured by choice] are the trailblazers and trend-setters who drive the change in the system. It's like how most of the stock market is passive investment in index funds, but the small minority of active investors end up controlling all the market prices.
The answer is that (1) some medical providers and clinics would start to compete on price, then (2) insurers would notice that clinics were profitably and sustainably giving these services at a fraction of the price, and would demand that the providers in their network slash prices to gain competitive advantage so they could lower insurance premiums and gain market share [capitalism], (3) consumers buying insurance would see the cost of the insurance plans drop, or if the insurance was "free", they'd see the coverage scope and limits improve.
It's like how the "Southwest effect" means that whenever 1 company is willing to buck the cartel and offer lower prices, ALL the companies have to slash prices so as not to lose all market share. So when Southwest Airlines began to serve a particular airport, ALL airlines operating in that airport were forced to slash prices, because if they didn't, Southwest would take over. That's capitalism.
Humans are fundamentally shitty and selfish. Capitalism is so amazing because it keeps them honest and forces them to invest their energy into providing the best product at the best price instead of into how to exploit people.
That's a straw man. In the US, hospitals are not allowed to deny life saving care to anybody, insured or not. Nobody ever gets left to die in the streets, and life saving care represents an insignificant fraction of the total care for people. The vast majority of life saving care resources are spent on super old people, to buy them just a short amount of additional time. Socialist governments kill these old people to save resources by using waiting lists to ration their care and ensure they die while waiting. The truth is that it simply is not a wise investment of resources to spend $1 million to buy some 85 year old 6 months more of life.
The stats in this study suggest Japan > US > EU in outcomes. I think Japan has somewhat of an advantage having a much healthier population, though.