Well, I guess on the bright side we might finally see the utter waste of resources that the TSA is eliminated. Guess this is one of those “a broken clock is right twice a day” situations. Not many wins to be had under this administration, but if this happened it would be one of the only positive things.
Hmm, I like this approach. How about this though. When a state fucks up bad enough to need a federal bailout, and it has to be the states fault not something like a natural disaster unless the state itself either caused it or demonstrably failed to prepare for it (looking at you Texas power grid) then the federal government does the following.
First they decide how much they’re budgeting to fix the problem. Then the State needs to decide if they’re going to provide a plan to keep that problem from happening again. If the state provides a plan then the federal subsidy payments are done in installments and those installments are conditional on implementing that plan. If however the state either refuses to make a plan or doesn’t make one that’s acceptable instead that money is put into a fund that people can claim some amount of to cover expenses for moving out of that state and into another one. This could potentially go all the way up to the cost of buying a house in a different state, although they then actually have to move out of their current state including selling any property in that state or else the money gets clawed back.
This way the problem gets solved one way or another, either the state improves or else there are fewer people stuck in shitty states.
Turns out letting the guy who habitually bankrupts businesses run the government “like a business” leads to financial problems. Who could possibly have predicted this? There’s also the fact he’s a complete moron, and likely is suffering from early onset dementia, and he’s a felon and conman just for that extra bit of spice.
There’s a time and place for disagreements, but basic human rights ain’t it. If this was the 1980s and we were all arguing over whether the wealthy getting yet another tax break would actually benefit the poor you might have a point. At this point the argument is about whether trans people should be allowed to exist and whether birth right citizenship should be removed (to say nothing of the concentration camps). Those are not disagreements anyone needs to hear.
OK, but now, what if instead of everyone using that money to buy insurance the government just bought the insurance for everyone. And then what if instead of paying an insurance company to pay healthcare expenses the government just directly paid those healthcare expenses. It would be so much simpler with a lot fewer middlemen involved.
Only the first one can be fixed by competition, the rest aren’t impacted by that at all. There are too many moving parts for it all to magically go away by just saying “make them compete”. For instance what happens when insurance companies compete to offer the best deals on group rates to employers but then charge exorbitant premiums to employees? Or what if insurance premiums all magically came down but pharmaceutical prices kept skyrocketing?
Medical costs are an inelastic demand as well as a non-discretionary expense. That’s an absolutely terrible combination which means they’re almost entirely isolated from market forces.
Consider for instance a situation I find myself in. I need a certain medication for a permanent medical condition. Fortunately there are multiple medications available (often due to patents there’s only a single option). Unfortunately I’m allergic to all but one of them. That means it doesn’t matter if the pharmaceutical company is charging $5 or $5000 I’m paying for it. I literally have no choice. Whether my insurance pays for 100% of that or 0% doesn’t change what the pharmaceutical company is charging. Further for insurance I was offered a choice of about 5 different plans through my employer (which is a lot by most standards, often employers only offer one or two plans). My insurance is by all metrics terrible, I pay thousands of dollars every year in deductibles, but once I hit those deductibles it covers everything at 90% which with my medical expenses save me tens of thousands of dollars a year. There are cheaper plans of course, but then the tradeoff is that I’m restricted to a tiny handful of doctors who are all terrible and every single medical decision has to be pre-approved by the insurance company or they don’t cover it and I’d rather pay the extra thousand dollars a year to keep those decisions between me and my doctors.
The US medical system is a hydra and fixing any one part doesn’t actually solve anything. The entire system needs to be overhauled top to bottom. Switching to a single payer system is just the first step in that process but it’s a necessary one because otherwise the problem is intractable. It’s likely the patent system is going to need to be overhauled at least with regards to medications before it’s fixed as well.
Mostly because:
A) Insurance companies collude with each other
B) are only half the problem (the other half being hospitals and pharmaceutical companies cranking prices up)
C) Most Americans get their insurance through their employer
and
D) Healthcare costs are complicated because they’re split between insurance premiums and out of pocket expenses and typically raising one lowers the other and vice versa
Insurance was always a terrible way to handle healthcare expenses because healthcare costs are generally non-discretionary and have far too many moving parts and payers.
At first I wasn’t convinced because it hasn’t posted much in the last couple hours, but then I got back to about 3h ago and there’s an absolute tsunami of posts. I stopped scrolling after like the 10th page of messages all in that same 1 hour period. It’s either a bot or they need to cut back on the cocaine.
What are you talking about? Nobody said anything about AI?
They’re also doing an amazing job of very accurately depicting all his minions.
It’s because of how bifurcated the American economy (and society) has become. The absolutely gargantuan wealth inequality leads to a situation that for the majority of Americans they’ve been experiencing a recession for years at this point if not decades, while for the wealthy things are going great. The US economy is literally being propped up by the continued funneling of wealth from the poor to the rich. The problem is the poor are rapidly approaching the point where they have no more wealth to steal. The middle class is almost entirely drained, and even some of the lower end of the upper class is starting to feel squeezed. It’s not sustainable and something is going to give one way or another. The economy can’t continue to function when over half the population can no longer afford basic necessities.
They probably could have kept the plates spinning for another decade at least, but then a moron got put in charge of everything and started replacing people who were greedy and corrupt with people that were greedy, corrupt, and barely smart enough to remember how to breath. This recent shutdown in particular is very much going to force the issue as all the people reliant on SNAPP and Medicaid (or is it Medicare, I can never remember which is which) are going to find themselves unable to meet their basic human needs from their meager salaries (if they’re lucky enough to be employed). Unfortunately I wouldn’t be surprised to see an increase in theft and rioting if this doesn’t get resolved real damn soon (might I suggest stealing the tacky gold plated shit from your nearest Mar-a-lago or Trump affiliated business). Even more unfortunately that might be exactly the excuse Trump is looking for to declare martial law. This is what nearly half a century of Reaganomics has gotten us. Maybe we can finally convince some of these idiots that cutting taxes on the rich and removing regulations on corporations does absolutely nothing good.
Cheque and check are two different things you’re just uneducated. A check is the mark you make to select a box, while a cheque is the thing you write to transfer money from one bank account to another. They’re different and yes people all over the US know the difference between the two.
Lol, I’m American, you just can’t spell. Cheque is the correct way to spell it, check is incorrect. You also don’t know how SS actually functions. Congress has treated it like a slush fund for decades and constantly steals money from it. And yes it is a budget item that gets voted on like anything else. You might think it’s an independent account, but that’s just the way it’s reported on the accounting forms, absolutely nothing is stopping Congress from taking those funds and spending them on whatever they want and in fact on many many occasions they’ve done exactly that.
That’s the great misconception and lie of Social Security. People think it’s like a government run 401k, that you’re "investing’ in some retirement account every paycheck. That’s not at all how it actually functions though. Social Security is two entirely independent things. First it’s a benefits program like SNAPP or Medicaid. In that regard Congress votes every year on how much budget they’re going to allocate towards paying people Social Security. Literally everyone receiving Social Security cheques in the following year are reliant on Congress deciding to allocate enough money to make sure those cheques don’t bounce. Secondly it’s an income tax. The two are not connected in any way. The amount of Social Security income tax that the federal government collects each year has absolutely no bearing on the amount of funding that Congress allocates for Social Security in the coming year.
Let that sink in.
Social Security is the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme. Always has been. That’s a huge part of why a lot of Republicans, particularly older ones (like ones around retirement age) are hand wringing about falling birth rates. Social Security always counted on the idea that there would be more people working and paying into Social Security than the number of people currently collecting Social Security. In a country with a positive population growth that would always be true. It ceases to be true the moment you have a negative population growth rate though.
Pretty sure I wouldn’t get donations from Aipac to start but if they’re stupid enough to donate to me I don’t see why I shouldn’t spend their money and go about my business.
The reason not to is because of the optics. People will always assume anyone you’re accepting money from you’ll show favoritism towards either consciously or unconsciously. That is generally how briberycampaign finance works these days. Large corporation, state, or billionaire “donates” to a politician, and in exchange they get to write whatever legislation they want or get the politician to vote for or against anything they want.
The title makes it sound like a lot more than it actually is. TL;DR: the most recent Republican gerrymander in one state wasn’t as bad as it might have been and it’s expected Republicans will try to re-gerrymander to make it worse. If they do Democrats are going to try to collect 250k signatures on a public petition which would then trigger a legal loophole that would revert things back to the currently gerrymandered but slightly less than it could have been map until after the 2026 election. Nationally there’s still no answer to the multiple Republican controlled states that are rigging elections in various ways.
Considering everything we know about Trump, yeah this guy would 100% be his spiritual advisor, they’re cut from the same cloth. He would have fit right in alongside Trump in Epstein’s club.
Hey silver lining, Trump seems to be doing a really good job of pissing off the military leadership and the common soldiers as well. The only ones that are actually supporting him are nut jobs, the grifters who think they can use him, and executives who think they can squeeze more profit out by crawling up his ass.
As for farmers that’s kind of a mixed bag. The problem isn’t so much that they’ll support him as it is that there might not be many of them left. Trumps policies are bankrupting farmers at a record rate and their farms are being snapped up by foreign holding companies. Most of them are going to end up working farms they no longer own.
The two key turning points are going to be the midterms and when it comes time for the next election. Depending on how those events go, and if Trump hasn’t died at some point in the next couple years (either from natural causes or because someone learns how to aim), things will likely go one of two wildly different directions.
If we actually have elections, and if the gerrymandering isn’t so horrendous that it’s impossible to overcome we’ll hopefully see a Democrat elected and we’ll start the incredibly slow crawl back to normalcy, hopefully with some significant reforms to make sure this shit doesn’t happen again. The process is going to take decades to unwind all the damage Trump has managed in just a few years, but in theory we’ll get there eventually.
On the other hand, we could go the opposite direction. Republicans retain the majority in the midterms, and then when the next primary comes around either we just don’t have an election or Trump “wins” a 3rd term despite that being unconstitutional. At that point we’re likely looking at either a civil war, or the US being defeated in a 3rd world war like Germany was in order to undo all this crap. Neither option is good and if things get to that point the world is fucked, the US doubly so.
Reading the quote it doesn’t sound like she was necessarily talking about Charlie Kirk. What was actually said was very ambiguous and there are a few different ways it could be interpreted only one of which would be in reference to Charlie being a grifter while the others wouldn’t. It’s certainly interesting and a decent chance it was a freudian slip, but the article title doesn’t really seem justified. It acts like this is some huge bombshell when it barely qualifies as a footnote.