Republicans and Democrats

And that 'problem' is that people can think, say, and communicate challenges to the propaganda and lies of too much of the Left?

There is nothing Liberal about these lying leftwing propagandizing hacks that seek to suppress the speech of Free Americans, just because it conflicts with their lying narrative.

Like that Trump was installed by Putin?
Or that Hunters laptop was Russian Disinformation?
COVID came out of a wet market not a lab?
Vaccine prevents infection and produces herd immunity?

Great thing about liars, the more they lie, the more people who recognise that they are liars and no longer believe them.

WSJ Editor-in-Chief Admits To Davos Elites 'We No Longer Own The News'

'Maybe the media Trump-Russia disinformation for five years has something to do with it?'

"If you go back really not that long ago, as I say, we owned the news. We were the gatekeepers, and we very much owned the facts as well."

Facts are observed, not owned.

"If it said it in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, then that was a fact," she continued, adding "Nowadays, people can go to all sorts of different sources for the news and they’re much more questioning about what we’re saying."

Propagandists don't like to be questioned.

'European Commission VP Věra Jourová also piped up during the same discussion, calling the rise of "disinformation" a "security threat," and suggesting that "It was part of the Russian military doctrine that they will start information war, and we are in it now."'

'Like when the Hillary Clinton campaign used a former (?) British spook's Russian source to fabricate a hoax against Donald Trump, which was peddled through the Wall Street Journal and every single other legacy media outlet? That kind of information war? Or when 51 former US intelligence officials used disinformation to rig the 2020 election, falsely claiming that the NY Post's Hunter Biden laptop bombshell was Russian meddling?'

 

We are therefore both free to draw our own conclusions on that one.

Well the jury found him guilty of sexual assault on the evidence, and Carroll is far from the only case. And this is the man who boasted he could do pretty much what he was accused of because of his position.

Now this is more interesting. I can find endless news on Trump and his views, but very little on what the Republicans themselves would change if re-elected.
Personally I think Trump is one of those dreadful men who promise the public whatever they want without any idea how to achieve it and no responsibility for the consequences of their actions. Not a leader in any real sense, controlling peoples expectations, but instead promising to lasso the moon for them.
However I can't believe the entire Republican party are the same, so I would be interested in what their manifesto is and what you hope to see from it.
(Likewise, for any democrats on here)

I didn't say 'any dirt' did I?
I said: equivalent dirt on Biden, why not? I suggest because it doesn't exist in such copious quantities.

In your opinion is that true of all court cases or just for the guys you like?

Thank you again and the feeling is reciprocated. We probably wont ever agree on Trump, though you have softened my view of him somewhat. But there is no reason why two folks can't disagree without behaving lie children.

Yes that is my point, I do believe a great many of those seen at his rallies are 'thicko truck drivers' but that cannot possibly be true for half the voting population. I appreciate the left wing press have seized upon the idea because of some of Trump's endless gaffs, just as the right wing press endlessly imply Biden has dementia.
What I want to know is what people want from the Republican party as a whole. Also how many Republican senators think Trump is the man to lead them.

I wonder if what turns off a lot of people is the lack of news on Fox, where everything is about Trump, not America.
That and the ridiculousness of the endless claims that Trump would end the war in Ukraine/ Israel. Fix this mend that with no meat on the bones of such claims.
Hence my view that Trump just says what he likes and hopes his followers believe him because he is Trump and anyone who doubts him is fake news.

If pushed I'd say the vast majority of Americans are no longer engaged in the stupid politics that has engulfed the States. Voter turn out in the Iowa Caususes was 110,000 out of 2,000,000 voters. That's just over 5%.
I have tried in the past on here to get Republicans and Democrats to engage in conversation on policy rather than Trump, but to date I have been unsuccessful.
Partly I tried because I'm interested, but also because I worry for the rest of the world if America gets a populist leader something like Benjamin Netanyahu who promises to do what's needed but doesn't listen to his advisors and ends up killing 25,000 people in the name of peace. Can you imagine if America went rogue?

So I finish this post with. Enough about Trump what do you want from your party.

 

I didn't compare, I merely stated two posters, myself and one other, have told you this and you are continuing the argument with both posters. The problem is the conversation is STILL about those adjectives. The other poster has been more specific while you keep dodging what the other poster is stating.

I am not going to be nice to you anymore. Are you a complete DF here? You were the one who disagreed with the other person, those three adjectives, and with my responses as well as the other poster's responses. You are the one who keeps responding, right? Will you take some responsibility for your actions or is that asking you too much to do?

As for the topic, the general business model is those three things. I have given you examples of how we codified those "adjectives" into law. And how every business, small or big, wants those three "adjectives" to be universal, even international if need be. It is how the global economy works now, and yet, you are still pissing in the wind because you know you are caught deadfoot here. So agian, when will you post something useful or have an actual conversation instead of pissing in the wind with all your posts in this thread, whether it is to me, the other poster, or who whomever?

 

Please don't speak on my behalf. I decided that the principles of running a business was not that important to the conversation and drop it.

 

I have read your exchanges, all of them, but you are still arguing the concepts in more detail to one extent or the other. But that is not speaking for you or on your behalf, just commenting an observation from those posts.

 

Fine. Just to let you know I'm not interested in these types of exchange. So many threads get destroyed by one person trying to pin down another on a single point that goes on forever.

 

Sounds familiar.

 

It is a civil jury that you are speaking of which is far different than a criminal jury. This means that a majority of that jury needed to conclude that in their mind it was at least a 50% chance that the allegation is correct. To my understanding the sum total of the evidence presented was that Jean Carrol ( while promoting her book) claims 20 something years after the fact that this super high profile guy assaulted her in a dressing room. There was no other evidence presented. It is a true he said she said with nothing else to back up that allegation and a whole lot of time that has elapsed. The New York jury which presumably is almost all liberal due to the demographics, used the same logic and said "well he claimed that he just grabs em by the P*ssy, and since she is saying he grabbed her by the p*ssy, that is enough for me to conclude that he probably did this time too"

Sincerely, that is the basic gist of this. It is every bit just as likely ( I would say far more likely) that she heard his comment about grabbing by the p*ssy, and decided to sell some books by claiming that he did it to her. Of course the rest of his statement was "they let you do it", which is not what Carrol has alleged. Somehow that part gets lost in the translation, so he really did not admit to the behvior being alleged by Carrol because she is alleging she did not let him do it. Trump was not bragging to Billy Bush that he likes to assault women ( nobody would see that as admirable), he was bragging that when a celebrity, the women are always willing. I doubt very much that his first move is to grab them by the p*ssy, rather I would surmise that he goes in that direction once they are kissing etc. That would be the common sense interpretation of his claim. Surely he wasnt bragging about raping women.

What the Republican party wants has not changed all that much over the years. Change in politics comes in very small increments, and everything is relative. Relative to Democrats, Republicans want a smaller, less intrusive government with the notable exception of defense spending, and they want originalist judges that preserve the original intent and meaning of the Constitution. It is not all that difficult to ascertain their goals if you look at it through that prism. Essentially all Republican desires can be interpreted through that prism.

I dont know exactly what you mean by equivalent dirt, every situation is different from one another. I sincerely do not want to go off on a tangent of arguing dirt on Biden, but the notion that he may have been involved in his ne'er do well son collecting tens of millions of dollars from foreign government and agents while possessing no discernible experience in those dealings that would justify being paid that type of money.

The one thing he would have to sell is his dads influence, and while one could argue maybe he was selling them a bill of goods, collecting money, and then not delivering anything from Biden, and if it were a one time thing, that could seem logical. The problem there is that this happened many times over a period of years with the same people, and it is hard to claim with a straight face that seems very likely that people with that kind of money would be that stupid. To make it even more suspicious. there are numerous shell cpmanies that funneled money to several different Bidens and taxes were not paid on that money. That has all the earmarks of highly illegal activity. If true, in my mind, that is about as salacious as it gets. I think that is MORE than equivalent corruption being alleged against Trump in my mind.

While I really do not want to go off arguing that subject, I do wonder how much of this have you heard about? I suspect very little, which was my point about leftist media and being able to ignore news that is negative toward the other side of the ledger. My explanation above is what is now known. I did not take any liberties or make any assumptions that is not known. The above definitely is a LOT of smoke regarding corruption. Is it a proof of there being a fire? No not yet at least, but it is undeniably a whole lot of smoke. It is truly difficult to imagine an innocent explanation for that entire situation that does not involve Joe.

All court cases? Well, I do believe that all lawyers are inherently dishonest, that applies to all court cases. It is part of their job description. A lawyer representing an obviously guilty client is duty bound to convince people that their client is innocent. I think we can all agree on that.

When you get into civil courts it is even more pronounced. If you want to point to the Jean Carrol case, as I outlined by the evidence above, with the given fact pattern, it does not seem credible or legitimate to me for the jury to draw that conclusion. Similarly, I dont think that Mcdonalds should have been successfully sued for their coffee being too hot. Civil juries have a strong predilection for siding with the defendant vs whomever is the big fish, and that conclusion has not one thing to do with Trump. It is a simple truism not related to politics.

Civility and the ability to have a productive conversation is in far too short of supply in here, unfortunately.

I have already covered what I think Republicans want above. As far as what Republican Senators think that Trump is the man to lead them, I am not in position to know, and I woulkd say that Im not sure that it matters. Above all else politics is about pragmatism, and you go with whatever is practical. If he is the standard bearer of your party you work with them. If he is not, then you do not. It is a pretty simple calculation.

I assume when you say there is a lack of News on Fox, I can only assume that indicates that you do not watch it much. Is there a lack of news during their primetime programming that includes Hannity, Carlson, Ingraham etc? Well yes, but those are very clearly editorial programs. They are not supposed to be news. Their evening lineup, as with CNN Msnbc etc, is filled with editorial shows. The rest of the day, Fox is pretty straight news, I would even argue far straighter than you will find with Cnn and Msnbc, but that is not a hill I wish to die upon or even spend time debating. I would allege that you will find far more left favorable news being presented on Fox regular news, then you will see right favorable news presented on MSNBC and CNN. Such a subjective claim is nearly impossible to prove, and even if you found an analysis of it, that analysis would surely be tainted to whatever side the author wants to promote so lets not bother going down that rabbit hole where we both pull up links that support our position. There are undoubtedly links that will do just that in both directions.

Voter turnout for primaries is always very low in all states for both sides of the aisle. That is not particularly new, especially in a year such as this where the result is pretty much etched in stone, especially in a caucus state such as Iowa that requires that people are there for hours. I follow politics far more closely than most, as probably is true of most people on this board, and I doubt very much I will bother to go out and vote in the primaries this year.

What I want, and what I will get are two different things. I want a government that is drastically shrunk in size and scope so that we are on the path to living within our means. There is no chance of that happening, so the pragmatist in me hopes that we can take small incremental steps in getting government out of our lives more than they currently are. I believe, with a few notable exceptions ( such as the military), that the private sector does things better and more efficiently than a bloated government bureaucracy.

I don't ask for much.

 

Oh dear. Please say it isnt so.

 

Sshhh, they'll hear you.

 

It still hears evidence.
Anyway we're going nowhere with this aspect.

You'll not be surprised to find I'm a leftie here. I think its very sad that America still doesn't have health free for everyone at point of contact. For me its a sign of civilisation. Lefties eh?

So backward looking laws? The only interpretations I can think of that might have changed are those regarding sexuality. The recognition by science that its your brain that decides what sex you are not your body. Is this what you are referring to?

I

Yes, but I like to think justice wins most of the time and when it doesn't its down to who has most money. Hmmm.







Civility and the ability to have a productive conversation is in far too short of supply in here, unfortunately.

If I was a Republican I would be worried about the amount of time wasted offsetting Trumps gaffs instead of getting the job done. The only way I could justify him leading is if I believed the rest of the party were useless. Quite a condemnation.

But they take up a large proportion of programming and are well known for lying by omission and stirring the rabble. We have our own here in the UK.
Fox news front page "News"
Former rivals set to join Trump in bid to defeat 'most corrupt president in history'
Biden campaign attack ad blames Trump for saving innocent unborn lives
Left-wing group tied to AOC faces dire cash crunch that could lead to job cuts
Democrats propose replacing term 'sex offender' to advance a 'person-first' approach
Golf tour left scrambling after biological male wins women's tournament

News?

Didn't know that. So "Trumps landslide win in Iowa" is nonsense?

Are you hoping for the same services provided cheaper or genuine cuts? What services do you want gone?
I ask because the right wing in the UK want tax cuts, but when pressed as to what they want cut its "Anything that doesn't effect me"

Very true at our time of life ( I assume too much but guess we are both doing Ok in our later years?) My views are based on my own past life. I left a bad home aged 17 years and had to fight my way through poverty to success. I remember all to well how difficult it is to break out and grow. Not the simple 'strength of character' those who had a good start with help from mum and dad assume is enough.

I'm glad to be rich, its lovely, but I've never forgotten those times.

 

Indeed it does. Its standard of proof as a civil trial is far lower than that of a criminal court. Given the circumstances of what evidence was presented that I have described, in concert with this far lower standard, I dont find its conclusion to be very convincing. I guess we will have to agree to disagree

Lol...I did not mean lefty as an insult if you took it that way. For me, when you call someone a Democrat they may say they are a liberal, if you call them a liberal, they may say they are a progressive etc etc. I could call myself a Conservative, a Republican because that is whom I vote for, or even a Libertarian because that perhaps more closely represents my views. I just find it easier to go with the generic Rghty/Lefty description to avoid such confusion.

As far as Universal healthcare, that is obviously a very vast subject. I happen to be a Sales Manager for a Medical Device company, so I probably have more insight than most on that particular subject.

Personally, I am all for healthcare for the poor, and we have always had that. Medicaid is healthcare for the poor and while qualifying for it varies slightly by state depending upon cost of living in that state, annual incomes for a single person under 30k or so typically qualifies in most states for Medicaid, and that income qualification number goes up depending upon family size. If you are a single making over that amount, I believe a person really should be allocating enough to pay for their own health insurance. It is not my responsibility for a person with income that could pay for health insurance that chooses to instead spend that money on other things. Even for those that do not buy insurance, they are still treated when being hospitalized.

People on your side of the ledger typically will then complain about someone using a hospital without insurance being "forced" into bankruptcy, but I even disagree with that assertion. Nobody is sentenced to bankruptcy, rather it is a legal protection that an individual can file if they so choose that will erase all of their debts. This is a good option for them, or they would not choose it. They also are allowed to keep things such as their house, car etc up to certain limits, and those limits are so high that if you were over those limits, you have no excuse whatsoever for not having insurance. Very few people that file for bankrutcy actual lose anything, other than their debt and their credit rating for a few years. I dont see this as the gigantic tragedy that most of the left will portray.

I have already explained that it is my belief that the private sector is far more efficent than the government in most things, and healthcare is not an exception. I fail to see how nationalizing 20% of our entire economy is a good idea. In my mind, it simply is not. I know all of the lefts arguments on this issue and can rebut them with my position one at a time when presented. I dont want to make this reply all that long unless we go off on this tangent so I will not carry it out all that long.

I know you will claim that the UN WHO study ( WHO has a stated mission of universal healthcare for all) from around the year 2000 ranks US healthcare as 35th or something like that and holds other countries systems up as far greater, but that analysis is pure garbage. There are not standardized means of making these comparisons and they clearly created the input variables to get their desired result, including giving a much higher score for havign universal coverage. Each medical system and even hospital all have different reporting systems. In the US, you will get vastly different reported results from one insurance database to the next covering the same hospitals, and this reality is magnified by a hundred when you start comparing one country to the next. If you believe that Cuba, (whom requires patients to bring their own bed linens to the hospital) has a better infant mortality than does the United States, I have a bridge I would like to sell you ( which is an American expression for someone is trying to dupe you).

I will just add one extra thing from my life experience. It just so happens that my wife is a sales director, but for software and she is global. She has employees scattered all around the world. She has one employee in the UK. This lady is in her 60s and not far from retiring. I think it was back around March that she started with a cough that would not go away. This morphed into pretty severe back pain. Anyone in Medicine knows that this is a concerning set of symptoms highly suggestive of lung cancer that has spread and is pushing on the spine creating back pain. She went to her primary care doctor, and an x ray revealed a mass in her lungs. An x ray is a very imprecise viewing instrument so a CT Scan is what is necessary to differentiate a tumor from pneumonia. That poor lady did not get a CT Scan until something like August or September. It was a shockingly long time. In the United States she would have gotten that scan the next day. If there was a problem, they could begin treatment immediately, and immediate treatement would be the one fleeting hope in that situation. My wife knows the lady still has a very raspy voice, she is not working much these days, and will be retiring very soon. She has not shared with my wife her diagnosis if there is one, so I dont actually know her situation. ONe thing is for sure, whatever her diagnosis, she either got treatment much later than she could have, or she was put through hell for no reason thinking that she was likely on the precipice of dying.

What I do know is that situation is a shining example of my belief that the private sector does things more efficiently. Supply and demand would produce result in more imaging clinics than a government system that does not run off demand from the people. The government system instead operates off of what the government wants.

We can discuss this in greater detail if you would like.

I dont consider originalism to be focused upon backward looking laws. I see it as following the Constitution. A perfect example would be Roe V Wade. While I happen to be pro abortion and think it should be legal. Roe V Wade was nonsensical law. It concluded that the right to privacy dictates that abortion should be legal because it is between a person and their doctor. That is a ridiculous interpretation. There is no way that is what was intended by the right to privacy. It is a clear bastardization of the intent of the Constitution. It was taking a desired outcome (legal abortion for all), and then bastardizing the law to whatever extent it takes to get that desired outcome. I disagree with that tactic, hence I prefer originalism.

When Roe V Wade occured in 1972, there were already a lot of states that had made it legal in the preceding years and more were coming. We probably would have arrived at legal abortion most everywhere without Roe V Wade. It was not needed. The states should be able to handle their own law making, not some bastardization to pretend like the founders meant the right to privacy would apply to making abortion legal.

Most of the time is all well and good. Im not so sure that a hated Republican President in a liberal jurisdiction fits under the category of "most of the time".

That is probably as unconventional of a situation as exists in jurisprudence.

Truthfully, for Democrats or Republicans, each candidate in those parties hold essentially the same views. You are placing a vote for either sides policies when choosing anyone. The person at the top is only different in their ability to be effective at what they do.

I would say that Trump was very effective at shining a light on the border situation, and rightfully demonizing China which are both very important issues. Probably the greatest thing that he did though was to clearly delineate how the press is little more than the marketing arm of the DNC.

For people that have followed politics closely, they have known for decades that the press is mostly leftist which we have discussed already. Knowledgeable people from both sides understand this principle and have for decades. For your run of the mill, dont care about politics people however ( which is a large swath of the public), they would watch CNN or ABC etc, and logically assume they are presenting things straight down the middle. They are not. They never were. UNderstanding this bias is critical to understanding current events.

With Trump these networks dropped all pretenses of objectivity, and literally everyone can now see how each source spins the news however they wish. This knowledge in my book is a huge step forward for those on the right, and we have Trump to thank for it.

I also think that Trunp has done the right a great service from refocusing those in the Republican party that are always compromising on their ideals in the hopes that the press will like them. This is short sighted thinking. Thumbing your nose at Republicans is a GREAT way to all of a sudden get a lot of good press, but when it matters, they will turn against you, so dont bother trying. You are hurting the cause at that point.

A prime example of that is John Mcain. He was the media darling when he was thumbing his nose at Bush in the primaries and he got all sorts of good press as a result. Such good press that in fact, it led him to getting the nomination in 2008. Once he had the nomination however, they turned on him on a dime and all of a sudden turned the most milquestoast middle of the road Republican imaginable, and then portrayed him as an extremist. They took the election between a rabble rousing community organizer that hung out with some very shady characters (Revron Wright and Farakkan for starters) and they presented HIM as the moderate and the undeniably middle-of-the-road Mcain as the extremist. Almost the identical thing happened 4 years later with Romney.

The lesson was to not compromise on your principles in order to get short term favorable press coverage by doing what the leftist press wants you to do. They say there for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In my mind, Trump was the equal and opposite reaction to what I have outlined here. Trump outed the RINOS as self-serving, and that is a HUGE step forward for the party.

Everyone in the pres wants bi partisanship, as long as it involves Republicans going along with Democrats. Not so much in the reverse. Trump has done a good job of exposing this notion.

When I think of FOX news, I think of on air programming. Here you are showing selected online content. I would venture to guess that you could go to any American TV online content (especially cable news) and find every bit of slanted headlines as what you have presented.

Do you think that you would not?

I didnt say that any results are nonsense. I would say that the results of Iowa indicate that he is going to win the nomination unless something big happens outside of the primaries, but we already all sort of knew that already.

Do you disagree that it means he is probably going to win the nomination?

If it were up to me, I would put in place a 5% reduction per year in spending across ALL programs for the foreseeable future. The private sector has been doing this for decades and that has forced the evolution of processes that have led to successfully doing more with less. The government is not accountable to profit and loss. Nobody there cares a lick about efficiency. Why should they?

My life experiences tell me that we could do so without sacrificing output. If it works in the private sector, it would work in government. I despise government bureaucracy.

My father was a truck driver. I would not say that I had a bad childhood because it was good, but I was definitely from a blue collar household, and I am in fact the only person in my family that went to college. While a union member, my father was very much a pull yourself up by the bootstrap Republican. He grew up extremely poor, and he saw the rest of his family as being parasites living off the government due to their own choosing. He was not wrong. I dont say that to mean that all government assistance is wrong, I support government assistance. Where you and I probably differ in that regard is in degrees of that assistance.

 

No. I am a lefties and proud of it.
Only a rightie would think 'leftie' is an insult
I was being comic.
More later buddy. I'm busy today.

 

HaHa...By all means, wear it with pride!

 

We first need to understand the changes taking place in both parties. The Republican Party is moving away from the old outdated GOP and to MAGA. The Democratic Party is moving towards the progressive left. MAGA still believes in the Individual the way the Founding Fathers believed. The Democrats are moving towards a Collective, socialist movement. Republicans accept their party is becoming a populist movement but unfortunately Democrats refuse to accept the progressives are moving their party away from the more moderate, just left of center to the extreme left. They hate Americas history, values and the Constitution which states the people get their rights from their creator. They want everyone to believe their rights come from man. And then there are the Muslims who believe Allah is the only one they should be governed by and not manmade laws. Oil and water never mixes well.

 

Let's see what the voters have to say about Biden in 2024.

 

The more important aspect to the overturning of Roe-V-Wade is now abortion is in the hands of American voters where it belongs and not decided by a government entity. This is a moral issue.

 

Speeding a moral issue should they be not in the hands of a government entity?

 

Can I assume you believe in the Christian god? At this time 30% of Americans attend church one a month. 53% say they believe in god.
I think the population is moving away from believing in an all powerful creator. So you could say the Democrats are right.

 

I apologize in advance for the length. We have covered a wide swath of topics...

I am glad that you brought up this "most common cause of bankruptcy" topic. The left brings it up all the time in their push for Universal healthcare. On the surface it seems like foolproof logic, but is it? When filing for bankruptcy protection, people do not put down a reason for declaring bankrpuptcy, theyy merely submit their outstanding accounts. If medical bills are part of that discharge, those studies count it is a medical bills induced bankruptcy. Think about this situation for a minute. Surely outstanding medical bills can lead someone to filing bankruptcy, nobody is arguing that, but do all of those listed with a medical bill is it because they did not have insurance and have a couple hundred thousand in medical bills?

Not by a long shot. You know what else leads to people filing for bankruptcy protection? Not being able to work and earn an income. When people come down with a long term serious illness, they are often out of work for a long time. When people are out of work for a long time, they are unable to pay their bills. This includes all of their bills. They p[robably are not paying their payment for their house, car, insurance, credit cards, and even if they have health insurance they probably have ciollected a couple thousand in health insurance deductibles that will be part of that debt discharge. These people are every bit a part of those numbers as are those that file bankruptcy because they don't have health insurance and run up huge healthcare debts. Both sets of people are filing for bankruptcy. I dont have a means of breaking those numbers down to whom represents what circumstances, nor does anyone. The undeniable reality that I am pointing to here is those numbers you hear bandied about about Medical bills causing bankruptcy in the USA are greatly exxagerated. A great many of those people would be declaring bankruptcy whether there are some medical bills involved or not. Being unable to work tends to get people behind on their bills. Surely this happens in the UK as well.

-I am going to tell you that I know full well what bankruptcy entails because I filed for bankruptcy protection in the late 90's. My wife and I owned two furniture stores for a product that was trendy in the 90s called a futon. We did very well at first, the bottom fell out of that market, and the next thing you know, we had $150k in debt to suppliers with whom we had to sign for that credit with a personal guarantee. Our personal finances were just fine, but we had that debt hanging out there, and to make sure it didnt come back to haunt us somewhere down the road, we opted to proactively file for bankruptcy protection. It was just as I described. Our debts were discharged free and clear. We did not lose one single thing. Not our $300k house at the time, not our car, literally not anything. Our credit rating dipped, but was back up to 700 within 3 years, and completely dissapeared after 7. While I dont recall applying for any credit in the first year or so, I was never turned down from getting anything. We continued leasing new cars for the two of us during that entire time and were not denied because of that bankruptcy.

In truth, I would have expected it to be far worse. It was just the opposite. It was basically one big nothing. Sincerely. It is shocking how easy it was. Truthfully, it SHOULD probably be made to be more difficult. We did it for over $100k in debt, but it was so simple, that someone could simply choose to do so with $10k or $20k in credit card debt just to take the easy route. In my opinion, it should not be that simple, but that is a different discussion.

If I recall correctly, I think at the time here, you were allowed to keep up to $400k in equity in your house before they would make you sell it to pay money over and above the $400k in equity. I personally would think that the house protections here are probably a good thing. I did not realize it was different in the UK but I guess I should not be surprised. Everywhere is different. Additionally, they would not touch your car here,

I agree that there are a few select things that government naturally does better such as the military, policing etc. I dont see healthcare being among them.

My opposition to universal healthcare is as much about a concern for quality as it is for cost. With economies of scale I can believe they can reduce costs to some extent, but even that is exaggerated. The reason that other countries spend less to such a degree is that they provide less of it, as evidenced by my example with my wifes UK employee. In regards to providing less healthcare, some of that is perhaps good. I dont doubt that in the United States we truly do spend far too much on end of life care when all hope is gone. This is quite common here and in the UK, they do not do this. We probably extend peoples lives another 6 months when those poor people have no quality of life and their relatives will just not let them go. We rack up enormous bills and spread out the suffering far longer in the process. This is a topic that should be addressed substantively.

However, I sincerely do NOT trust the government to make this decision based on their current budget. I truly would fear that somewhere down the road they may have a giant budget shortfall and opt to cut back on healthcare as a result. In times of great financial distress, that is not an outrageous worry. I dont want the government having that type of power over my life. I trust the free market far more.

I also am concerned about who pays for what. With Obamacare, they already subsidize those up to about $50k( this was pre 2020 so with inflation that has probably went up) in income for their healthcare. $50k in income is a fairly middling number around 50th percentile in income. For the life of me, I do not believe that everyone else should be subsidizing Mr 50th percentile in his healthcare. He can opt for a smaller apartment, less expensive car etc so that he can pay for his own healthcare. I have no problem paying for the truly poor, but 50th percentile is far from being poor. They try to sell univeral healthcare as a means to reduce costs, but the reality is that it is a means to shift those costs to higher levels of income.

The upper 10% here pays 70% of all federal income taxes. If we increase the federal budget by 20%, the upper 10% is going to bear 70% of those additional costs. I fail to see how that is fair or smart policy. For the most part, people can and should pay for their own healthcare. I dont mean the poor, I have no problem paying for them, but for everyone else? Why should I or anyone be subsidizing Mr 75th percentile?


Continued below...

 

I had to break my response into two replies due to its length...

Let me start by explaining that right after closing the furniture stores in the 90s, I began selling pharmaceuticals, and have been in Medical sales ever since. What this means is that I literally argue medical studies for a living. Maybe not as much these days, but I have a long history in doing so. I know full well how to assess the strengths and weaknesses in various studies. I know full well how easy it is to manipulate input variables to get whatever is your desired result. If a pharma company wants to do a head-to-head study with a competitor to demonstrate that they have better efficacy, their product will be dosed a little higher than normal in that sudy, and their competitor will be dosed a little lower. If they are wanting to demonstrate that they have less side effects, they will dose their drug a little lower and their competitors a little higher. For this reason, doctors tend to wholly discount post launch studies that try to draw comparisons to competitors.

Pivotal studies going solely against placebo used to get a drug approved are highly regulated, while everything else is sort of the wild west, even those that are in peer reviewed journals, of which, few if any of those country to country comparisons are in peer-reviewed journals because there is not a valid way to make comparisons of unlike things. If there is one study that says that Drug A reduces symptoms by 20%, and there is another study that says the competitotr Drug B reduces symptoms by 15%, I cannot by law compare those. It is not just a matter of law, doctors will 100% ignore that comparison because they know it is not valid. None of the conclusions are legitimate. This is because different studies have different patient subsets, different raters, different inclusion criteria etc etc. These undeniable differences make comparisons 100% invalid. They are not accepted in the medical world.

This is an unusual situation because I brought up the WHO study and then proceeded to argue against it. The reason I did so, is because whether you know it or not, it is the study that provides almost all of the talking points that you hear on this issue. It is referenced nonstop. You may not know these various claims come from that study, but they do. This includes comparisons of life expectancy, ranking US 35th, Cuba has lower infant mortality etc etc. If you want to present some data from a different study making these comparisons I will be happy to look at it and dig into its specifics, but whether you know it or not, most of the claims in favor of universal healthcare reference that WHO study. Because there is not a legitimate means of making these comparisons, there is a scant amount of valid data on this subject.

As I mentioned before, the stated goal of the World Health Organization is universal healthcare for all. With that being their goal, how surprised are you that they arranged the input variables so that the one large country without UHC ends up being very low on that list? How did they do this? For starters, they ranked very high the concept of access to healthcare. That is a self fulfilling prophecy. If the US wants to argue their healthcare is superior, lets just make access to it a high ranking and since everywhere else has UHC, they will fall far behind on that measure while not actually addressing the notion of which system provides higher quality care.

They also put life expectancy as the primary driver of determining healthcare system effectiveness. This on the surface makes sense, but does it really? Life expectancy is about culture and ethnicity. There have been vastly different life expectancies across various cultures forever, long before any form of a healthcare system existed anywhere. This is primarily driven by whether people live sedentary lifestyles, how healthy is their diet, how obese is the population etc etc. You can also throw in various ethnicities, Native Americans and Blacks have significantly higher rates of diabetes and heart disease which lead to lower life expectancies in the aggregate. A healthcare system can extend the life of a cancer patient, but it cannot help a person whose diet has led them to be 400 lbs and they die of a heart attack at age 50. You could try to argue that a healthcare system could possible get people to eat better and exercise more, but in my mind, that claim is hollow. The United States either leads or is at least very high in regard to sedentary lifestyles and obesity, if they have a life expectancy that is 3 years lower than Canada, it is this reality that drives that difference, NOT that Canada has a better healthcare system. To conclude that it is the healthcare system is off base, and yet that is the mechanism that the WHO study used in order to call the UNited States healthcare system as inferior. That is as disingenuous as it gets.

You can compare costs yes. Nobody is arguing that the United States model is cheaper. Of course it is not. You cannot however compare survival rates. I would say that the WHO does not look at survival rates, I have seen a few studies that have attempted to make that coneection, and on that measure, I have seen the US do well in that regard. With that being said, even if it shines favorably on the US, you cannot legitimately compare survival rates. The reason is that there is not a standardized method of reporting such outcomes. One might think that for every patient diagnosed with prostate cancer, that there is someone entering this into a database as to when diagnosed and what is their 1 year, 3 year, 5 year survival going forward. There is no such mechanism. Some hospitals log this data, so do not. Some do so 10% of the time, others do it 100% etc etc, and others do nothing of the sort.

The closest that we come to this type of scenario are insurance databases. Each insurance company tries their best to capture this data. Because of the lack of consistency in reporting, one insurance database differs greatly from other insurance databases, they do not come even close to matching up. The reason they do not match up is for this same principle, there is not a standardized method of reporting. If there is not a standardized method of reporting, the subsequent data is not worth the paper that it is printed on. This is for insurance databases within the United States. Just think of how much more complicated that would be trying to track this data between countries. It is not worth the paper that it is printed on.

People know where to get the best healthcare available, and while im not going to be so bold as to declare that the United States definitively has the best, I am going to be so bold as to unequivocally declare that they are not 35th. Not even close. It would be hard to argue with a straight face that it is not in the top 5. You could even argue it is number one, but admittedly, there is not an actual means of honestly making that declaration.

To claim that a country where one has to wait 4 or 5 momths to get a CT scan for a cancer diagnosis has a superior healthcare system is a tough argument to make. You could argue it is superior in regards to acess, but in regards to outcomes? Not a chance. The best chance that a cancer patient has is an early diagnosis, and making them wait an additional 4 or 5 months before starting treatement is the very opposite of maximizing their chances.

Yes they do. See above.

I suppose it is a weird choice because you didnt mention it. It is not a weird choice though because I am referring almost exclusively to the WHO study, and that is one of the more inarguably nonsensical claims that it makes. It claims that Cuba has lower infant mortality than the United States. Not only can you not make comparisons due to differences in reporting, but you also most certainly cannot trust a Communist government to report data fairly. Additionally, based on the reality that their healthcare system is so unbelievable inadequate that patiens need to bring their own bed linens to the hospital, it is impossible to believe this claim as legitimate.

I see that you are blaming the right wing for the poor healthcare being provided. Not knowing the detail I have no basis for saying that your conclusion is wrong. With that being said, this sort of makes my point. There will always be the right wing, and they will have varying degrees of power in the future. This is a shining example of why I do not want to trust the government with such decisions. Even if it works now, it may not work in the future. I think your statement is a shining example of why you should not trust the government with your healthcare. You have no idea what tomorrow brings.

What do you mean by Trumps type of change? Roe V Wade was overturned after Trump was in power. I was addressing the notion of being an originalist with the constitution and defending against the notion that this is a backwards looking policy. I was not addressing change for change's sake.

I will take that explanation one step further. Roe V Wade created law. The US system is designed for the elected legislature to create laws. The judicial branch is supposed to simply interpret those laws. Giving the unelected judiciary the ability to create laws goes against our entire system. It was never the intent. Doing so gives the judiciary far more power than was intended, and it takes away power from the legislature. Eventhough I support legal abortion, I do not support the means used to get that accomplished. It should have been through the legislature.

Being an originalist does not mean that you focus on backward-looking law. It means that you support our system as designed while maintaining the checks and balances that was intended when this country was founded.

 

This is very interesting, we have the opposite in the UK with a very right wing press, so I would agree it does make a significant difference.
Our BBC are generally considered left of centre, but much of our written press constantly draws attention to asylum seekers and the difference between immigrants and Brits. Even though Asylum seekers make up less than 0.4% of the population you'd think they were destroying the country.
So yes I get your point here

I literally took all those headlines from Fox's front page. No selecting needed. Your argument I thought was that Fox was not guilty of this spin?

I didn't mean you said it. I was drawing a conclusion from the numbers. The press called it a big win, but it was tiny.

Yep we agree there, most small business constantly looks at savings. My only caution was that I found as my company grew waste became harder to control, but then we made savings with our purchasing power.
I'll let you know if waste gets worse when we get as big as the American government.

 

Fair enough. I did not know that the press is right wing there, although I realize what you call right wing is probably not what we call right wing.

My position is that you will find every bit of leading headlines online from the other news sources.

My argument is NOT that FOX does not spin. Of course they do. They all do. Their regular newscast during the day is pretty straight down the middle, but their clickbait online content like all the others comports more closely with their primetime editorial shows.

Just for giggles, this is a cut and paste from the front page of CNN at this exact moment, no cherry picking involved...

Trump spent the evening seething, not celebrating
5 takeaways from the New Hampshire primary
Analysis What New Hampshire proves about Trump
See the moment everyone is talking about from Trump’s victory speech 2:07
Analysis These maps help explain Trump’s massive New Hampshire win
Fact check Trump makes false claims in New Hampshire victory speech
These Trump supporters show why the former president is dominating the race
Kaitlan Collins: Trump’s ‘fury was obvious’ after primary win 1:42
UAW expected to endorse Biden as he prepares to fight Trump
See a full breakdown of results from New Hampshire
Opinion In victory, Trump loses it
Hoping to chip away at Biden’s Black vote, conservative group to test menthol cigarette message in South Carolina primar


...and here is MSNBC

THE SHOWS GO ON
Ethics probe into GOP’s Matt Gaetz reportedly reaches a new level
STEVE BENEN

LOOKING UP
Joe Biden should be feeling optimistic right now
LAURENCE H. TRIBE AND DENNIS AFTERGUT
Trump trails Biden in key battleground state in new polling
WAY TOO EARLY
Biden expected to receive UAW endorsement
JOSÉ DÍAZ-BALART

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
EASY EXPLANATION
There's a simple reason Trump won in New Hampshire
CHRIS HAYES
Claire McCaskill: It was a really bad night for Donald Trump
MORNING JOE
The irony of Trump’s angry reaction to his N.H. primary victory
STEVE BENEN
Trump’s biggest fans just showed us who they are — again
PAUL WALDMAN
After two nominating contests, the RNC has apparently seen enough
STEVE

Im not sure what to title it, big or not. To me, him getting the nomination at this point is a foregone conclusion barring something unforeseen and drastic. However we title the Iowa caucus in my mind is meaningless.

Haha.

In my mind, government largesse is synonomous with waste. Im sure the larger a company grows the more it is difficult to control waste, but even still, unlike the government that large company still has motivation to do more with less or they could go out of business not meet their profit goals etc. Government does not have that motivation. If they fall short of money, they will get more. Peoples jobs are not on the line.

 

So what are the figures? There's no point in claiming the numbers are wrong if you have no evidence as to what they really are.

Was this a LTD company?