I care about outcomes, not motivation. Greed is good as long as greed delivers.
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Politics and Economics
“…shorter life spans, limited income and wealth potential…mass incarceration … limited access to educational resources and political participation, state-sanctioned killing by police…”
Even more important is how much the federal government actually collected in taxes during this Golden Age of high taxes on the rich. After all, governments need to collect money to redistribute money. So in the 1950s were federal tax revenues higher than they've been more recently? No.
One way ideologies instill confidence and hope is by romanticizing a time or place where one's ideals were at least partly realized: see, it was done before, so we can do it again, but even better. For some, that romanticized time and place was western Europe and North America during the 1950s*. Exhibit A:…
But the California system uses a rigid, top-down approach that disincentivizes labor-saving innovations in nursing care. That's because California hospitals would still be stuck with the same minimum RN:patient ratios even if ways were found to reduce time spent on some nursing tasks (e.g., documentation).
Who are the one percent? Technically, households with an adjusted gross income of at least $465,626. But who are those people? Many work in occupations that pay so well they have plenty of money available to get richer still through profitable investments. Many work in the following occupations...
It looks like job stress has gone up a bit over the years, while work hours and satisfaction with work load and level of RN staff levels haven't changed much since the implementation of AB 394. Kinda disappointing when you think of the added expense of all those extra RNs and RN hours. This is not at all to say that nurses haven't benefited from the implementation of strict staffing ratios. It just doesn't look like the benefit has been all that great. And then you've got to ask if it's worth it. Because there are costs to these extra costs.
“The basic takeaway from the analysis was that there is variation in quality from hospital to hospital, but that variation it is not correlated with for-profit status.” Maybe For-Profit Hospitals Aren't So Bad, Harvard.edu Blog
US healthcare spending is almost twice that of the other developed countries. Pharmaceuticals and medical goods (e.g., medical supplies and devices) are a relatively small part of that difference. If we knocked off, say, $200 a year in drugs and medical goods, we'd hardly make a dent in overall US healthcare spending – which is approaching a per capita average of $10,000 a year.
First we've got to get a handle on what the US actually spends on healthcare. According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (National Health Expenditures 2016 Highlights - CMS.gov), US healthcare spending reached $3.3 trillion in 2016, or $10,348 per person. That represents 17.9% of the gross domestic product (GDP). For comparison, the “Comparable Rich Country” average for healthcare spending was $5169 per person in 2016 (10-12% of GDP, depending on the specific country).
…By virtue of their antipathy to Trump, making Democrats into vocal deficit hawks and free traders so that even if they win back Congress or the Whitehouse, it would be hard to change their tune.
“When inequality loses its association with hope and instead becomes interpreted as a signal of a rigged society, higher inequality relates to lower well-being” (Buttrick, N. R., S. J. Heintzelman, et al., 2017).
... Averaged across the above groups, 24% of Republicans surveyed by Pew considered economic inequality to be a "very big" problem, compared to 62% of the Democrats surveyed.
...ideologues tend to exaggerate societal problems, the better to justify their Big Solution. Big Solutions need to be justified when they require painful sacrifice (the darkness before the dawn), as they often do. That pain had better be worth it. Hence: Big Solutions need Big Problems.
Point is, no one has an emotional reaction to inequality without a sense of what it speaks to. Inequality is a concept for God's sake. It's not at the same level of concreteness as, say, a snake slithering in the grass.
The above game is an example of what I call an "Act of God" study design, in which researchers (playing God) randomly dole out good and bad fortune to study participants, typically in the form of monetary payments.
For the most part, these are longstanding Republican complaints against the Democratic Party. What's changed over the years is the intensity of feeling that accompanies the complaints...
Is it any wonder that a lot of Republicans soured on the environmental movement or came to doubt the "consensus" on climate change? Sure, as members of a pro-business/limited government party, it's not surprising that Republicans would be a bit less gung-ho about environmental regulation than Democrats. But that doesn't explain the change in Republican opinion over the last decade or so.
Some government programs have already been shown to reduce chronic and transient poverty. One multi-year study found that the following government benefits combined reduced the chronic US poverty rate from 10.8% to 2.1%...What more can be done? Lots! Just a few ideas...
At the debate, UBI advocates dismissed these predictions as overly speculative, maintaining that possible risks could be managed. Their main argument was that a generous UBI was called for because Americans are suffering and their situation will keep getting worse without a major overhaul of the social contract. More specifically: poverty, income volatility, job instability and stalled social mobility are a plague upon the country and the only cure is a universal basic income. ...So let's look at these Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: