Stealth Moose
Umbrella Elite
Originally posted by Ushgarak
There is no halfway negotiation point on this- that's a golden mean fallacy. Any delay or alteration to Obamacare as the Republicans are demanding is a Republican victory. Their tactic is to make Obama look unreasonable by not negotiating, but the simple fact is that the entire Republican approach is unreasonable in the first place, exploiting a weird loophole in the American system to try and extort changes to a bill resulting from an argument they already lost.The Republicans are absolutely at fault, will lose this and will take most of the blame. Though to be fair on the Republicans, it's only an insane wing of their party causing this trouble- but that wing has the potential to cripple the party.
^ I actually agree with you for once here. This is spot-on.
If there's one thing that I think taxation should be spent on, it's the health of the people.
Absolutely, Lucien. As it is, the US of A spends more money than anyone else on healthcare, which is inexcusable, and this rhetoric that any form of socialized medicine is robbery is ridiculous. When someone goes into the ER and can't pay, we all end up paying. Similarly, when someone drives uninsured and causes a wreck, all our premiums go up. I'm not sure why people assume that they are islands without financial support from others when it comes to healthcare and when we all get benefits in the form of energy bill subsidies, school financial aids and grants, and public taxation to provide education for all children in the nation.
No person has evolved into a middle class or high class "success story" without living in the same infrastructure that supports us all. Oh god, I'm on a soapbox. Hold on a second, let me get down from here.
Doesn't America spend about 700 billion on the military and not even close to that on health care? Yeah it sure does suck that they're taking more money for the latter, huh?
As of 2011, WHO noted that we spend close to 18% of GDP in healthcare as it is now. Obamacare, which is as noted not even close to its intended form at this point due to concessions, isn't available for anything but speculations from either party, which range from 1.2% GDP to ABSOLUTE ANARCHY OMG. It's unclear how much of either figure includes out-of-pocket expenditures or self-pay, but I imagine the WHO's estimate likely includes this as it's pretty much an argument against our current medical set up. Obamacare's "market system website thing with fines for individuals but not businesses" is something else entirely, and not this socialized monster the far right keeps talking about.
I'd like to point out something astute from Jon Steward: that some Republicans are calling ObamaCare the worst law in the history of mankind (not even just the US), and we have a track record which includes slavery and Jim Crow laws. Bravo, sir.
Military spending, strictly on military ranges from 2.2% to close to 5% on most major sources over the last ten years, but the adjacent departments, contractors, etc. that surround the proper military likely increase this by quite a bit. It's harder to get an accurate figure on just what counts since some figures seem ridiculously low; for example, we outspend any other country, and some countries in the top ten in groups, but somehow fail to break double digits of our GDP in most sources Google readily provides. I might look more into both but at the moment I'm on entirely too much caffeine to sit through all of the sources to win this one facet of an argument.
Also, about the shutdown...
It's so cute when they grow up and then throw tantrums because they can't override a law that was passed and survived multiple attempts to kill it before it became effective. This would be like Kirstie Alley losing Dancing with the Stars and then shutting the whole thing down next season until the judges negotiated by accepting her unconditional terms. Wait, no, that's just stupid and unreasonable.