America The Generous

Yesterday I was at the Meals on Wheels main office in East Austin bagging groceries (HEB donates food in bulk on pallets and we break it all out and create grocery bags with one of each thing in them). I have done this many times before, but yesterday was the first time I was assigned the task of breaking down boxes and taking them to the dumpster. To get to the dumpster you walk thru a gauntlet of MOW vans that are returning from delivering meals. These vans all have sponsors names on the back, big companies such as Walmart, and local companies like Don Hewlett Chevrolet, and many in between like St. Davids. It just made me think about how many such organizations like MOW are supported largely by individual and corporate donations and volunteer efforts to serve the poor, and yet we are constantly told by politicians and other such people that we must do more and how greedy corporations are. Corporations are made up of *people*, most of them generous with their time and money and this picture of corporate America as only concerned about making the next buck is just not true. America is the most generous nation on the face of the earth WRT helping the poor, some might say too generous (in that our largess of donations creates a class of folks who do not provide for themselves since someone else is willing to do it), and I just cannot listen any longer to folks who say we do not do enough, and I am really sick of these companies who do so much to support programs such as MOW getting slammed in the media (when was the last time you heard anything good said about Walmart).

 

It's all about power, regardless how good a company is to the community.

 

Blood money spent to defray their destruction of middle America.

J/K. MOW is an example of an entitlement that's helping the right folks and, I'm assuming, is done efficiently due to the amount of other people doing it as well. I'd hate to see it diminished. Good work on your part.

 

MOW is quasi-gov/church/corp org. Not sure how they get it to work, but it does.

 

It's a great example of the elusive private/public partnership. I'm sure it can always be more efficient but it's an essential service in a culture that has lost it's touch with their elderly. In most other cultures, it's assume that the children take care of their parent in their latter years. Most American's don't feel that cultural obligation, although it is still strong in the 1st/2nd generation immigrants.

 

MOW is a terrific organization with a terrific mission. The recipients are so grateful and the volunteers so enriched. That should be a separate question in a culture that has always praised hard work, but is providing ever diminishing rewards to those who have to actually physically work hard.

 

Do tell gents. Please detail this great destruction and the ever diminishing rewards that corporations have forcibly wrought on the middle class. I love the facts you guys are always willing to provide after these rhetorical flourishes.

 

Iatrogenic: If you don't like rhetorical flourishes, just look at the data:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tan...n-rise-for-decades-is-now-highest-since-1928/

Or maybe look at the life and death impacts of economic strain in the working class:

https://www.theatlantic.com/educati...e-collapse-of-the-white-working-class/520815/

 

Mine was quasi tongue/cheek.

 

So basically, around the '70s, rich people started trying to get richer. Not coincidentally, that was around the time that the market became a much more prominent source of income. The article points out that the 1% got hit pretty hard by the dot-com bubble bursting, so you can make an easy inference that the top-level tech booms have disproportionately hit that group as well. And that's where the financial growth has been in the last 30 years.

Is it fair that we live in a system where making massive amounts of money generally happens when you have enough disposable income to invest? Well... that's not going to change. And if you decide to tax them into oblivion so they don't have that advantage, then all the gains in tech and digital that we've seen in the past few years goes away. People put in the work to make the next advance in digital because there's a huge reward in it.

 

There have been productivity gains in manufacturing, retail, food service, transportation, etc. driven in part by digital technology. Minimum wage, as purchasing power has declined significantly since that's what my contemporaries were making back in the late 1970s. (I owned a hay truck so I made way more than they did...) Low wage earners are not kept down by low productivity, it's low bargaining power.

 

No time to provide a detailed response now, but neither of those articles remotely back up your claims of woe. Saying the rich are getting richer doesn't mean the middle class is getting poorer. The article also ignores the transitive nature of the population between income levels over time, which is huge. The Atlantic article is a sad example of journalism even by today's very low journalistic standards. Just think about this paragraph from that article:

"It’s not just that lack of education has led to declining incomes, although that is certainly the case. The authors find that white men of all ages without a four-year college degree are less likely to participate in the labor force. But there seems to be a broader effect among white Americans in middle age: Not having a college degree often results in fewer economic opportunities, which in turn may trigger things like divorce, poor health, unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse, suicide, or raising children in unstable conditions."

Also note that no statistics were provided. The author provided percentages and interpretations, and contradicted himself within the article when comparing deaths of whites and blacks.

The salient, depressing point is that Liberals seem to ignore verified facts, but glom fraudulent claims too often when trying to create new government programs or effect policy. This process has been ongoing for about 90 years with extremely limited success.

 

We came out of a depression, won World War II, built a fantastic higher education System... but yeah if you look there is plenty to complain about. The standard of living in my family is way the hell better than it was in the 1930s when my dad used to hitchhike because he thought it was cool to ride in a car, then get let out and walk back home..

 

Not sure I follow your line of thinking as it relates to the topic.

 

"Saying the rich are getting richer doesn't mean the middle class is getting poorer. "

How would you define what constitutes the middle class? What about the amount of retirement savings?
Perhaps the amount of savings available for an emergency?
Maybe the discretionary funds to travel annually for a vacation?
How about the ability to pay for education without going into debt?
Avoid sheer number of bankruptcies resulting from medical expenses?


Using these arbitrary parameters, I've read numerous statistics showing that increasingly the percentage of Americans falling short on these criteria are rising. No, I'm not going to take the time to look them up now and cite statistics. I'll leave that to somebody else.

 

Two things: more international competition from low wage countries and an increasing skills gap. The result is that you can't afford a lot of low skilled people on the payroll.

 

Also, for those companies that offer health coverage for employees, the costs keep spiraling far in excess of inflation. To stay competitive, you either drop coverage, freeze or reduce wages, move offshore, or automate.

 

The biggest news in the CBO report is that 4M people are estimated to lose employer sponsored insurance with the Senate bill. So, even for those that are working that won't be an option for medical insurance.

 

People will not "lose" insurance, they will lose the entitlement of someone else paying the bill. And people who do not pay their own premiums or deductibles are the biggest abusers of the healthcare system.

 

About 4.7 million had their plans cancelled under Obamacare. Did the CBO distinguish between people who would no longer be able to get any insurance as opposed to people who would no longer be able to access the same insurance they previously held? I'll admit I haven't bothered to dig into the depths of this legislation because once we decided to let the government manage any part of it, it was never coming back to the private sector, and none of this addresses the actual issue with health coverage anyway, so as far as I'm concerned, all this is just rearranging desk furniture on the proverbial sinking ship.

 

Are you claiming that under the AHCA there were individuals that lost any/all insurance and had no ability to replace it or simply that they couldn't get the exact same plan that didn't meet the minimums set forth in the AHCA? Those are two significantly different arguments.

I'm no expert on the various CBO analysis but believe the AHCA offered significant replacement options/subsidies for those that would lose it. Of course, that also drove the tax payer funded costs up.

Agreed. Healthcare in it's current state will never work. The idea that health care affordability is tied your employer is pretty restrictive in the evolving liquid workforce economy.

 

EXACTLY!!!

 

It's some of all of that. That's the number that was put out there by Obamacare opponents, and it was generally dissected and qualified. So what I would want to know is whether the CBO number is comparable. What do they mean by "will lose insurance?" Can those people now apply through other means? Can they apply through the marketplace or get private insurance? Was Medicaid their only option for insurance? That program was expanded massively under Obamacare, so it makes sense that rolling that back would be translated as "causing people to lose coverage." So are there other options that those people can access? You could make an argument that they never should have been under Medicaid to begin with.

 

Exactly. Of course there's no mention of the 100's of millions of insured Americans who virtually 'lost' their healthcare because deductibles priced them out.

In 2015 I received five lower back injections for a bulging disc. I've had two MRI's verifying the issue, one before the shots and another after. Showed same problem.

So I still have the medical issue (will require surgery) and it still causes discomfort. Thanks to SocialistCare my deductible ($2,000) and out of pocket ($5,000) is absurd.

No chance I'm gonna pay $1,000+ per shot again for a few months relief. And I'm certainly not gonna have back surgery until they get the insurance costs down.

Gotta love paying for a high quality insurance plan that's only cost worthy to use for check-ups and scripts.

 

WTF? "100's of millions who virtually lost their healthcare"? Starting a debate from an absurdly dishonest place doesn't generally end up well.

Unless you were on Medicaid, I'd love to understand how any of that is the AHCA's fault. Did you purchase your insurance on the public exchange? Which insurance plan did you choose?

 

Those are arbitrary and useless parameters. We are talking income, not how people spend the income. A person could easily have a higher income but spend it unwisely and therefore be "poorer". Savings and spending differ by individual preference. We aren't measuring how people spend their income, or how much they save. If you believe corporate America has destroyed the "middle class" by forcing individuals to spend or save a certain way, you are beyond left field. We are measuring income, which the posters claim has been destroyed by big, bad corporate America.

 

This is what has worried me about the GOPs political dilemma on repealing Obamacare since the beginning. It's virtually impossible to transition from a government system to a private system without causing major calamity in the short term. The root of the problem is that in the context of healthcare, the public doesn't want to accept risk, which means it wants third party payers (government, insurance carriers, etc.) to pay the bills, and that means significant insulation from market forces and therefore high costs. You can't have low costs if you expect universal access to healthcare, and we pretty much expect that.

I've given up on having a free market system for healthcare. Over the next 10 - 20 years, both parties will screw around with crappy "reform" plans that try to be everything to everybody. Eventually, we'll settle on a single payer system or a public option (which is essentially single payer) basically out of political exhaustion.

 

Agree 100%. This was the exact motivation behind Obamacare. The architects knew it would implode, but would take a while to fall apart.

The years it lasted were meant to solidify universal access to healthcare as a norm and expectation of the public.

Now with universal access a must or people will supposedly 'die in the streets', reforms are doomed to fall short in some major aspect and face backlash.

Dems will promote single payer as the only workable option for everyone. And eventually the majority of the public will give in since reforms fell short.

It was a socialist scam from day one and unfortunately will likely accomplish its single payer mission at some point in the future.

 

Time to make another vain attempt to educate you. Change in INCOME isn't the proper metric in determining whether or not you are financially better or worse. Change in PURCHASING POWER (what your income is actually worth in the market place) is the relevant metric. When the cost of medical services and education rise more than triple the rate of income for median wage earners, they are in fact much worse off. This has nothing to do with right or left on the political spectrum. It's math. Purely fact based.

 

Following up on my last comment, iatrogenic would have you believe that first, the middle class is expanding, not shrinking, and second, if the middle class really is shrinking, it's exclusively the fault of too much liberal government.

I'm not going to defend liberal policies or even discuss everything from food stamps to social security here. I want instead to point out the function of government is to make and enforce law. That's true whether the government is far right, communist, socialist, or anywhere along the spectrum.

Politics is basically a competition to influence and control the governing apparatus. In the US, people mostly interpret this fight between liberals and conservatives. That's also the media interpretation. The bigger war that is largely unspoken is between corporatism and labor. The corporate interests won that battle a few decades past. For a while, all boats rose with the tide of corporate profits. Eventually, capital began moving production and even services from the US to newly open third world markets. Low interest rates made debt easier to finance and consumers in the US were able to substitute debt for stagnant income to maintain living standards. Meanwhile, the Democrat party joined the Republican Party in terms of backing corporations. The new left no longer represented labor, but instead championed social warriors (queers, race baiter, pro-abortion, etc.).

Finally debt has just about caught up to the consumer.
The government which has long ago been captured by corporatism has set the rules and enforces to their benefit. This is why the taxpayer backstops student loans; why hospitals don't have to post rates they charge for procedures and charge different prices for individuals who receive the same treatment.

Much of the current economic system is based on low interest rates, fraud, and collusion. If it were reformed now, the entire system would implode. Instead, the perversity continues at an ever accelerating rate. Military operations and hot spots now include the South China Sea, Africa. Syria, Yemen, Korea, the Baltics, and probably other places. Another trillion will be spent on nuclear upgrades. Health care costs continue rising and tuition rates go up. Leaders relax standards as the government has their back.

This is what Iatrogenic calls capitalism. It's nothing more than the latest model of fascism and it's where America currently stands.