The ACA is a crock... I'm not arguing that. I've stayed away from trying to defend it and agree with many of the arguments levelled against it - though perhaps for very different reasons. At the same time, it remains to be seen just what will happen. The system's been perturbed and it's ringing around and it'll take a while to settle down and see what happens and who the true winners and loosers are. (Arguabley, the Insurance companies and Everyone else not on Medicare/aid but that's me being cynical).
The US National debt is strange. It won't go Greece because what happened in Greece wasn't that the government couldn't pay - it was that investors began to doubt they could pay which pushed interest rates so high that in the end they couldn't pay. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Borrowing for nations works a little different than it does on a personal scale because most nations have control over the value of their money.
Put succinctly, interest rates on US treasury bonds are so low, that they're actually lower than the annual rate of inflation. People earn interest on their bonds, but at the same time the value of the dollar decreases year on year. If the bond yields 2% interest, but the dollar inflates at 3% annually, then the bondholder in effect loses value over the lifetime of the bond, while the treasury gains. In effect, the US makes a profit on each and every bond it issues. And because of this, each time bonds come due the US is able to roll them over by selling more bonds to pay for it, then cover additional expenses. And so long as the currency inflates faster than the interest on the bond, the treasury makes a profit.
If the interest rate does climb too high then the US can artificially inflate the value of it's currency because it has control over it's fiscal policy. Being tied to the Euro's value - this is something that Greece couldn't do. So the only option available is to crank up taxes and cut back spending which is arguably the worst thing to do in a recession because it kills what little circulating money their is in the economy. Never mind that Greece is a special basket case - in theory they had their social programs paid for and it was all covered by taxes, but they were coooking the books wildly.
The downside of doing this is that it'll utterly annihilate people's savings, stuffs bondholders hard and stealing a loaf of bread suddenly becomes grand larceny. But people who have their money as physical assets might ride it out better - anyone with dollars in a bank or an investment/retirement plan dependent on bonds gets the shaft however.
Now, as to welfare queens. So what? There're always people who take advantage, but the additional bureacracy and hoop-jumping necessary to be seen to be tackling them costs far more than just ignoring them and letting them be. The amazing thing about welfare queens is that they spend the money they're given - it doesn't get locked in a bank account somewhere. It goes into circulation, paying salaries and suppliers up the chain. Just because they're either don't want to, or are unable to, find legitimate work, doesn't mean they can't be used out of a fashion. Ultimately, they're always going to be a drag on society in some way and far better to have them indoors and eating than on the street begging or worse. At least, it's better for their kids who might yet choose to make something of themselves.
The 'Welfare Queen' issue is not something to be corrected bureucratically - that just makes even more headaches for the honest people who genuinely need the service. It's to be corrected socially by changing people's attitudes. Or do you want to add yet another layer of government bureacracy and snooping? You let a person's neighbours and acquaintances deal with the problem. It's very hard to create a basket case state through welfare alone - contrary to what the People's Republic of Haven would have you believe - ultimately you need some people to work on some level anyway just to keep shops open and farms ticking over - and many people are going to want to work anyway even when there are genuinely less jobs than workers because most people want to feel like they're contributing - and contributing in a manner that puts them at their best. Others are ill-suited to certain types of position.
I have my doubts about charity. More and more you see that 90% of the donations a charity takes go towards soliciting more donations and salaries for charity employees than it does towards actually getting things done. There're some hideous examples out there - wasn't there a nasty scandle there recently in the US over that. At least in government, there is theoretically oversight from somewhere - somewhere for the buck to stop and that ultimately these individuals are answereable directly to the people. That right there is the power of democracy.
It'd be an interesting experiment to try and run a command economy with Facebook-level data mining..... information technology is thousands of times more advanced today than it was in the 70's. Soviet Five-year-plans were a monumental bureaucratic undertaking - even without the layers of party politics and nomenklatura they all had to be done effectively on paper, with some assistance from basic computing hardware. Many basic needs such as food and housing and heavier industries are relatively predictable constants - it's in consumer goods where the real flexibility is required because people are faddish. Part of the reason the command economy failed as implemented in the USSR was a lack of flexibility.
I'd also argue that the USSR was only nominally 'communist'. May of the criticisms levelled at 'communist' countries are not things wrong with communism as such, but the party that's running the country. The basic ideal of the Eastern-Bloc was that the 'vanguard party' was attempting to mould society towards proper communism in the future. Where Lenin arguably got it wrong was with the idea that he had to beat people over the head to do it, and then as the revolution turned into a regime, the Party became more concerned with securing it's own prominent position and privilege than providing the for needs of people or advancing the true goal of the revolution - then it began to age and stagnate as the grandfathers clung on to their personal privelege to the detriment of the people and focused more on stomping dissent than on actually improving things. There's a really good joke about Brezhnev going to pick up his mother in his State limousine, with her complaining that he'd better be careful or the Bolsheviks will take it away.
I could make a cynical comparison at this point, but I won't.
Not helping the cause is that many truly oppressive regimes merely use the veil of 'communism' to give themselves an air of legitimacy when in reality they are anything but - or to snaffle up Soviet arms and food aid. For many it was a way of getting themselves backed by one of the big superpowers to secure their position. (DPRK anyone, which only recently gave up on the idea in favour of Juche). Other tin-pots snuggled up to the States by portraying themselves as anti-communist.
It's also interesting to not that the Soviet Union was a democracy too - far more than many People's Republics ever where. A Soviet is a local council elected by direct democracy - then you have regional councils on the same format, all the way up to national councils then to the supreme soviet itself. In theory, the whole lot was democratic, and people could choose between candidates, then councils choose candidates to the next council and so on with each picking the one who best represented their interests. In practice whoever got to be a candidate had already been hand-vetted by the party not to rock the boat too much for the grandfathers above.
There were still opportunities to be had for anyone willing to work for them. All that changed was who you had to convince to fund the idea. Work was a right. Arguably arts and culture were more respected rather than commoditised and it was possible for an ordinary textile worker to get a shot at going into space. Healthcare and literacy rates were higher. It wasn't that people had no rights as such - they had different rights.
The point is, 'communism' and Sovietism were not the big evil bogeymen that the echoes of McCarthyism still try to paint them as. Ultimately, communism or socialism are little more than different paradigms for society and government, each a system that arguable has its own merits in certain circumstances, with it's own drawbacks. Capitalism, and corporate capitalism is the same... The idea system of government is probably somewhere in between hard capitalism and hard communism, taking the best strengths of both paradigms.
This 'privatise everything' malarkey is utterly poisonous and ultimately just as destructive for society as any tinpot.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
The US National debt is strange. It won't go Greece because what happened in Greece wasn't that the government couldn't pay - it was that investors began to doubt they could pay which pushed interest rates so high that in the end they couldn't pay. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Borrowing for nations works a little different than it does on a personal scale because most nations have control over the value of their money.
Put succinctly, interest rates on US treasury bonds are so low, that they're actually lower than the annual rate of inflation. People earn interest on their bonds, but at the same time the value of the dollar decreases year on year. If the bond yields 2% interest, but the dollar inflates at 3% annually, then the bondholder in effect loses value over the lifetime of the bond, while the treasury gains. In effect, the US makes a profit on each and every bond it issues. And because of this, each time bonds come due the US is able to roll them over by selling more bonds to pay for it, then cover additional expenses. And so long as the currency inflates faster than the interest on the bond, the treasury makes a profit.
If the interest rate does climb too high then the US can artificially inflate the value of it's currency because it has control over it's fiscal policy. Being tied to the Euro's value - this is something that Greece couldn't do. So the only option available is to crank up taxes and cut back spending which is arguably the worst thing to do in a recession because it kills what little circulating money their is in the economy. Never mind that Greece is a special basket case - in theory they had their social programs paid for and it was all covered by taxes, but they were coooking the books wildly.
The downside of doing this is that it'll utterly annihilate people's savings, stuffs bondholders hard and stealing a loaf of bread suddenly becomes grand larceny. But people who have their money as physical assets might ride it out better - anyone with dollars in a bank or an investment/retirement plan dependent on bonds gets the shaft however.
Now, as to welfare queens. So what? There're always people who take advantage, but the additional bureacracy and hoop-jumping necessary to be seen to be tackling them costs far more than just ignoring them and letting them be. The amazing thing about welfare queens is that they spend the money they're given - it doesn't get locked in a bank account somewhere. It goes into circulation, paying salaries and suppliers up the chain. Just because they're either don't want to, or are unable to, find legitimate work, doesn't mean they can't be used out of a fashion. Ultimately, they're always going to be a drag on society in some way and far better to have them indoors and eating than on the street begging or worse. At least, it's better for their kids who might yet choose to make something of themselves.
The 'Welfare Queen' issue is not something to be corrected bureucratically - that just makes even more headaches for the honest people who genuinely need the service. It's to be corrected socially by changing people's attitudes. Or do you want to add yet another layer of government bureacracy and snooping? You let a person's neighbours and acquaintances deal with the problem. It's very hard to create a basket case state through welfare alone - contrary to what the People's Republic of Haven would have you believe - ultimately you need some people to work on some level anyway just to keep shops open and farms ticking over - and many people are going to want to work anyway even when there are genuinely less jobs than workers because most people want to feel like they're contributing - and contributing in a manner that puts them at their best. Others are ill-suited to certain types of position.
I have my doubts about charity. More and more you see that 90% of the donations a charity takes go towards soliciting more donations and salaries for charity employees than it does towards actually getting things done. There're some hideous examples out there - wasn't there a nasty scandle there recently in the US over that. At least in government, there is theoretically oversight from somewhere - somewhere for the buck to stop and that ultimately these individuals are answereable directly to the people. That right there is the power of democracy.
It'd be an interesting experiment to try and run a command economy with Facebook-level data mining..... information technology is thousands of times more advanced today than it was in the 70's. Soviet Five-year-plans were a monumental bureaucratic undertaking - even without the layers of party politics and nomenklatura they all had to be done effectively on paper, with some assistance from basic computing hardware. Many basic needs such as food and housing and heavier industries are relatively predictable constants - it's in consumer goods where the real flexibility is required because people are faddish. Part of the reason the command economy failed as implemented in the USSR was a lack of flexibility.
I'd also argue that the USSR was only nominally 'communist'. May of the criticisms levelled at 'communist' countries are not things wrong with communism as such, but the party that's running the country. The basic ideal of the Eastern-Bloc was that the 'vanguard party' was attempting to mould society towards proper communism in the future. Where Lenin arguably got it wrong was with the idea that he had to beat people over the head to do it, and then as the revolution turned into a regime, the Party became more concerned with securing it's own prominent position and privilege than providing the for needs of people or advancing the true goal of the revolution - then it began to age and stagnate as the grandfathers clung on to their personal privelege to the detriment of the people and focused more on stomping dissent than on actually improving things. There's a really good joke about Brezhnev going to pick up his mother in his State limousine, with her complaining that he'd better be careful or the Bolsheviks will take it away.
I could make a cynical comparison at this point, but I won't.
Not helping the cause is that many truly oppressive regimes merely use the veil of 'communism' to give themselves an air of legitimacy when in reality they are anything but - or to snaffle up Soviet arms and food aid. For many it was a way of getting themselves backed by one of the big superpowers to secure their position. (DPRK anyone, which only recently gave up on the idea in favour of Juche). Other tin-pots snuggled up to the States by portraying themselves as anti-communist.
It's also interesting to not that the Soviet Union was a democracy too - far more than many People's Republics ever where. A Soviet is a local council elected by direct democracy - then you have regional councils on the same format, all the way up to national councils then to the supreme soviet itself. In theory, the whole lot was democratic, and people could choose between candidates, then councils choose candidates to the next council and so on with each picking the one who best represented their interests. In practice whoever got to be a candidate had already been hand-vetted by the party not to rock the boat too much for the grandfathers above.
There were still opportunities to be had for anyone willing to work for them. All that changed was who you had to convince to fund the idea. Work was a right. Arguably arts and culture were more respected rather than commoditised and it was possible for an ordinary textile worker to get a shot at going into space. Healthcare and literacy rates were higher. It wasn't that people had no rights as such - they had different rights.
The point is, 'communism' and Sovietism were not the big evil bogeymen that the echoes of McCarthyism still try to paint them as. Ultimately, communism or socialism are little more than different paradigms for society and government, each a system that arguable has its own merits in certain circumstances, with it's own drawbacks. Capitalism, and corporate capitalism is the same... The idea system of government is probably somewhere in between hard capitalism and hard communism, taking the best strengths of both paradigms.
This 'privatise everything' malarkey is utterly poisonous and ultimately just as destructive for society as any tinpot.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?