I am.
I just want to put a few facts out here for all to see:
1) Single Payer is not the only route to universal health care, and Germany is an excellent example of that!
If you don’t believe me, please proceed …. to these links —
pleasecutthecrap.com/…
www.theatlantic.com/…
www.startribune.com/…
Try googling — you will see I speak the truth!
2) The Financial Transaction Tax is a great idea! And there is a very real chance that because investors will shift their funds that it will not generate enough revenues to cover the free tuition plan proposed by Sen. Sanders.
A Brookings report estimates the maximum return on this to be $50B per year, and Sen. Sanders own web site estimates the free tuition plan will cost $75B. I know there is a UMass study, but I am not sure it represents the economic/financial consensus on this issue. Other countries have generall found meager revenues from FTT once implemented.
3) Aggregating individual contributions does not prove that someone is beholden to a particular industry. This is a zombie meme that was used to “prove” Obama was beholden to Wall Street because of all the contributions. It is LAZILY used by media fact checkers to prove Hillary is beholden to WallStreet/Pharma/…. It is a lazy, zombie meme. Individual contributions are still CAPPED. Hillary Clinton’s largest aggregated donor for her career is Emily’s list. They are not corrupt. Her seventh biggest is the University of California. In fact, you can find NO health insurance provider that has an aggregated contribution bigger than UC. That means, just as Citibank, Goldman-Sachs have INDIVIDUALS who favor Hillary, so does UC. There is NO disconnect between the individual contributions Hillary Clinton has received and her avowed desire to do away with Citizens United. Sen. Sanders has made a personal decision to disavow superpac contributions because of his distaste for CU. That is working for him. (I do note that many of his labor contributions are from union PACS.) Obama in 2012 and Hillary now have decided not to disavow those contributions (by the way, they DO NOT CONTROL THEM!!!!) because they don’t want to be handicapped against the GOP who have NO compunction about taking as much superpac money as they can.
Oh, if you look at who has given to Hillary via the PAC route, you will see a lot of familiar names from the left — and one banker — Soros, Saban, Katzenberg, Spielberg, someone who developed automated library information systems… ….. , but also — plumbers and pipefitters union, Fair Share Action (which advocates for political and economic equality). To me it does not reek of corruption.
4) Hillary is not the only one who has used legislative sausage making to slam her opponents. This has also been diaried here today, and Bernie was given 4 Pinocchios.
5) CNN fact checking did NOT find that only one thing Hillary said in the town hall last night was true. In fact, two were true, one was mostly true, and one was rated false. The mostly true and false are in fact disputing whether the GWB administration and GOP congress had more to do with the success in getting Iran to close its nuke program, which is obviously something worth debating further rather than accepting the words of CNN fact checkers at face value.
6) Common Core is not New Math!
OK, gotta do some work.
Monday, Mar 14, 2016 · 10:33:58 PM +00:00 · dlcox1958
Two things:
- Regarding individual contributions, correlation is not causation. Just because you can aggregate individual contributions from a particular industry does not prove that a candidate is beholden to that industry. See here, here, and this really interesting piece on whether campaign contributions drive corruption about which even Lawrence Lessig is unsure: “But is that what is really happening? Lessig himself consistently hedges that even if systemic corruption is not as great as he thinks, most Americans still believe that money buys results and that the “profound lack of trust” is enough to warrant reform.16 In his article Against Transparency, Lessig wrote that Big Data hasn’t yet proved widespread corruption: “The most we could say—though this is still a very significant thing to say—is that the contributions are corrupting the reputation of Congress.”17 The main proponent of the idea of systemic corruption is not sure if it is true.”
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This NPR piece gives a rather excellent overview of health care systems around the world. True single payer is in fact rather rare. Most are multitiered, all but the US are nonprofit.
UPDATE 2: Fixed the link to Brookings. Thanks to Jonnnney for pointing this out, but no thanks for calling me stupid, Jonnnney.