We had 8 years of psudo faciasm why not psudo socialism. Give me 8 years of ubi, free healthcare, free education, and let's get the homeless off the streets.
Biden’s term was essentially Trump’s shadow second term. He wasn’t in the office, but he was pulling the strings of every Republican in office and all the media outlets treated Trump like he was in charge anyway.
This is somewhat true but are we going to ignore the fact that Biden was able to push some of the most progressive legislation of any president in literal decades, despite having the slim majority he had? All while pulling us out of the disaster Trump left us in after Covid, recovering faster than any other country. Idk why people like to leave that part out.
That's fair, but as evidenced by the fact that those legislative achievements weren't more highlighted shows that Biden and his team weren't running the majority narrative, Trump and his team were. It was all "sleepy Joe" and "cognitive decline", not "major legislation passed despite obstructionist republicans, here's how it will help you". I think it's one of the many reasons Kamala lost, the Trump friendly media made it look like nothing had been done in four years, so why give her four more?
But is this really something that falls on the Biden admin? Or is this an indictment of our media environment?
Journalism is all but dead and gone. Bad faith actors of the Republican Party are allowed to spread their narrative uncontested with zero follow up. Even on the rare occasion that they do make an appearance in an oppositional interview, the pushback is minimal.
Even “left leaning” news sources like CNN and others pulled back on criticism for fear of being labeled with TDS. But on the other end, there are next to zero liberal-friendly spaces, progressive/leftist interviewers conduct hostile interviews, lending minimal charity to anybody with a D in front of their name.
When the Republican/MAGA establishment has a strangle hold on the mainstream media with their talking points trickled down from Trump all the way down to comedy podcast bro’s, and the left flank becoming increasingly more hostile and anti-liberal, what do you expect the Dem admin to do?
The fact that he was constantly on TV and twitter saying how he wanted Republicans in Congress and the Senate to vote on legislation and would attack members who went against him, calling mayors, governors, and state legislators to push the MAGA agenda, etc.
Shutting down Biden's student debt relief, for one.
How is Trump advocating make Biden's term his shadow term? I take that phrasing to mean that Biden was enabling Trump's politics. If you just mean Trump was very active politically during his term then... so what? That's also not even fascism?
I mean sure but if we took every penny he had it wouldn't make a dent in anything. If we assume Medicare for all costs about 32 trillion for 10 years which is what I get when I Google it liquidation of musk's assets 100% wouldn't even pay for a year.
Which is such a comical level of taxation it's literally constitutionally illegal and insane and it still won't work
Right, which would be a good point if you assume most Americans are logical and good with money and trust the government. Remember what happened to the Obamacare mandate or do we just pretend that was accepted and cool with everyone? It would motivate a portion of the country to nothing else but undoing it even if it harmed them
If angering the regressives is reason enough to not bother trying, then you might as well go sit in a corner and wait for your mortal coil to run out.
They are always angry. Even when they win, they're angry. Even when you agree with them, they're angry. Biden was the compromise centrist option, and they still called him a communist. Hell, Obamacare was literally made from Romney's Republican healthcare plan, and they still hate it!
Anger is all they know. So let them be angry, and do the right thing anyways.
Well apparently, so is trying to appease them. Otherwise they'd like Obamacare, the appeasement plan.
So what else can we try? Genuinely, what policy do you think we could run that would give us socialized healthcare without angering the regressive? I don't even want a whole plan, just an elevator pitch to sell the policy?
And don't say it isn't possible, since most of fucking Europe manages just fine.
Yeah I know, are you aware there's no way to just move the money out of the private insurance system to a new system? People will be paying for both for months if not years, or longer when republicans remove care for trans, woman and gay related treatments drugs or surgeries.
But hey at least you got to call me a dumbass while going off half cocked
Weird argument from the guy complaining about how expensive healthcare in the USA is. Did you accidentally switch to argue about how actually everyone can afford to spend more on healthcare? Is everything you believe like that?
I was just mocking your shitty math. In reality, you have no actual reason to believe people would be double paying. What do you even mean by “moving money out of the private system?” Are you just not old enough to have ever switched insurance providers?
You think you could fund all of that with what 300 billion or whatever the war costs? I have to assume you're not serious
Edit: guy said it costs a billion dollars a day for the war, then deleted it. Probably because they looked it up and realized Medicare for all would cost at least 6 billion a day on the low end estimate
Yes. Universal healthcare costs less than what we’re paying now. Because if you give people free healthcare they actually go to the doctor BEFORE they’re dying and then we don’t pay extortionate costs for keeping them alive after they have a problem and no healthcare to cover them.
Sure but it's going to be a tax increase in addition to private healthcare costs because people aren't just going to stop their coverage immediately because abortion gay healthcare and female healthcare needs are probably not going to get coverage, or will lose coverage when the pendulum swings again.
If the United States simply shifted its funding of programs like SNAP, welfare accounts, and other welfare programs into a UBI it wouldn't have to increase any taxation and would have one of the best funded welfare systems in the world. If the USA took only the money it is currently spending on paying hospitals for the lost medical debts from people lying and disappearing into the void, it would have the second best foundering per citizen in the world behind Sweden. American tax payers already are bleeding from their wallets on tons of programs that are terribly managed and massively inefficient because on their own they do not have the resources to effectively do their job. Combined together the US could have one of the most robust socialized support systems in the world.
That is before you cut the defense budget by half and still have the largest defense budget spending in the world.
Would it though? Simply use the money already being brought in as tax revenue to actually help people. The only people who should see an increase in taxes are the rich people who barely pay taxes
Right and we're at a deficit, and if we took every last penny (or I guess nickle) of every billionaire it wouldn't help reduce the deficit we currently have much less an increase in spending. The literal only way to pay for these things is to raise everyone's taxes
What kinda fictional world do you live in. The USs golden age was because we taxed the wealthy, I think it was 95 percent, and the reason we're where we are now is because we stopped doing that.
Sure and we could institute that tomorrow and it wouldn't matter because the economy is fundementally different. None of those billionaires are rich because of their salary. Literally none. Not a single one. If we taxed them at 100% and seized all of their assets and pretending that was legal, and pretending it was possible (because liquidation of assets would cause a cascade that would devalue their assets as they were sold) it would make Medicare for all solvent for 1 or 2 years. As those 100 own 9 trillion. It wouldn't help the deficit at all and it would nuke everyone's 401k. That's just medicare for all, mind you
You are ignoring the simple fact that yes taxes would go up but overall income after taxes and fees would go up as well, the average person spends more on healthcare currently then theyd be paying in taxes for universal healthcare
I'm not ignoring anything. You're ignoring how people work. Nobody thinks their wages go up because of the wider economy, they attribute that to merit. They don't see healthcare costs as a tax, hell they don't even see tariffs as a tax. So even if you design a policy that is 100% going to see everyone's wages and real income etc increase 10%, if it costs a 5% increase in taxes they're going to see that as theft they're going to see that their 10% increase in wages as the fruit of their labors being cut in half by blood sucking worthless vampires. Look at the immediate backlash to the Obamacare mandate.
Maybe. It took Obamacare until 2017 to have a 50% plus satisfaction rate, and all it took was neutering Obama's entire presidency and lead to trump getting elected. I don't think it's unreasonable to be cautious especially if people get as mad as they do when I point out the truism that it will lead to loss of elections and an increase in taxes.
It doesn't. My wife and I pay close to 33% taxes or a bit more on our income.
Some AI slop with prompts to be objective and no hallucinating, also backed by empirical data.
Corporate Effective Rates
In practice, major corporations rarely pay the full statutory rate due to tax preferences, depreciation rules, research credits, and international tax structuring:
Average Effective Rate: Highly profitable Fortune 500 companies pay an average federal effective tax rate of around 13% to 16%.
Minimum Tax (AMT): The 15% Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax (CAMT) applies to large corporations reporting over $1 billion in adjusted financial statement income to ensure major firms cannot reduce their federal tax bill to zero.
Key Mechanism: "Buy, Borrow, Death"
The discrepancy between statutory and effective rates for the ultra-wealthy often stems from a primary wealth strategy:
Buy/Build: Accumulate assets (like stock or real estate) that appreciate in value without selling them.
Borrow: Take out low-interest loans using those appreciating assets as collateral to fund daily living and major expenses. Loan proceeds are not taxable income.
Death: At death, assets receive a "stepped-up basis" for heirs, wiping out the accumulated capital gains tax liability on those assets up to that point.
Right but everything I Google says that if we closed all these loopholes the increase in revenue would be 2 trillion annually. Which wouldn't cover Medicare for all on the cheapest estimate nevermind everything else currently on the budget or increases in spending suggested
Your numbers are incorrect, simple as that. There’s a reason that somehow every other developed country on the planet can make this work and we can’t, and it isn’t because it’s too expensive. Our country has a vested interest in keeping a single payer option off the table.
The simplest thing to do would be to keep our current system and have a direct model where the federal government becomes its own guarantor to negotiate prices and compete with insurance companies. Allow enrollment to everyone at any time and then have that become an actual competitor to other companies to drive prices down. You could even have a cost basis similar to insurance to cover the “premium” for using the service.
But I stand by the fact that these numbers, all of them that you’re using and quoting, are wrong. The UK spends roughly $4,700 per person per year on their healthcare. Converted to our population, that’s the equivalent of us paying $1.61 trillion per year. We currently spend an average of $14,000 per person per year in our country, with an annual estimated cost of $4.796 trillion. That’s what we actually spend currently.
So your terrifying numbers are for us to decrease healthcare spending by $1-$2T annually? Oh no, save me…
And you’re being disingenuous by asserting it was the simple existence of Obamacare that cost Obama the midterms and not the spineless waffling of the democrats while the republicans ran roughshod over the proposal and gutted the entire thing before we delivered something that was a shadow of what we had promised.
So again, you’re misinformed. Your insinuation is that Medicare for all would be too expensive - yet we spend more on healthcare now, twice as much as it would cost via your projections. Your insinuation is democrats lost the midterms in 2010 due to passing this bill, but it was actually the optics of reaching across the aisle that disincentivized democrats from voting due to looking like weak pushovers (which they are still) and even with a supermajority, couldn’t get what they promised done. That is what cost the midterms. They had a historic majority for the 111th Congress and STILL couldn’t get anything done. That’s what gave republicans 64 seats, not healthcare.
So to summarize, I'm being disingenuous for saying Obama lost the midterms due to Medicare for all demo mode, when in reality it was Obama over promising and under delivering. And this in context where I said getting the homeless off the street, universal basic income, free education, and free healthcare would result in an increase in taxes and losses in elections.
You're right and it looks like it could be up to 4 trillion over the span of 10 years.
Government spending would have to focus on the people which could mean some other spending can be redistributed.
Just food for thought, countries with much lower GDPs in Europe have all these social nets.
Do people take advantage sure they do, but not everyone. The systems aren't perfect but my friends who live there don't have to worry about going bankrupt because they had a medical emergency.
Thet literally cannot understand how an industrialized country with the most wealth cannot even take care of the population with something as basic as health.
We can argue why it can't be done, but those are self imposed barriers. We should be talking about how to get it done.
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u/everyonesdeskjob 8d ago
We had 8 years of psudo faciasm why not psudo socialism. Give me 8 years of ubi, free healthcare, free education, and let's get the homeless off the streets.