No healthcare though.
or living wage, or affordable housing
or infrastructure or child care or
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed in 2021 allocates $550 billion over the next five years. That’s in addition to another $650 billion that was already allocated.
I know you and I have a habit of disagreeing on essentially all things, so feel free to not respond to this, but I did want to put an actual fact out for anyone else reading and thinking that we literally don’t spend money on infrastructure while we throw tons of money at war, because that’s simply not true, even if you think the proportions are off.
The infrastructure and jobs act was far less than what we need, because half the government wants to starve the poor and kill them with preventable diseases and enslave them in lifelong debt. Remember that.
Wow, I can just feel the rush of the goalposts flying by!
Eat my ass. It’s a fact that the bill was whittled down by compromises because half the government thinks any form of government spending is too expensive. Yet that same half loves spending money on war. Where’s the lie?
Sorry, I’d rather not. I’m afraid I’m not a furry.
They already spend a ton of public dollars on health. The problem is that it goes to insurance companies, administrative staff, and the downstream health costs of inadequate early access to care.
You’re kinda contradicting yourself.
They don’t spend public dollars on health. They give it to insurance companies and administrative staff and pharmaceutical companies and other private moneyed interests, and then there’s none left for us.
They actually do spend a lot of public dollars on health, it’s just spent into a system that isn’t efficient. Universal access to care drives down costs significantly across the board - instead they have piecemeal coverage and a system with overall costs inflated by administrative staff hired solely to manage insurance billing and delayed treatments.
It’s an interesting area of policy where expanding coverage means lower costs overall.
A lot of the money they spend on “health” isn’t actually spent on the labor or materials or research needed to provide healthcare, it’s stolen as profit by private companies.
It’s important to remember that this money isn’t being spent on our healthcare. It’s being handed to moneyed interests.
This is true for any health system (labour and technology costs are huge components to health care, even in systems with universal coverage). However, there are also huge and significant costs inherent to any system that doesn’t provide universal coverage (e.g., people delaying care leading to more severe illness costlier to respond to). Private insurance systems also introduce significant cost pressures even for non-profit and publicly funded providers by driving up staffing costs and requiring more support staff to operate.
All this to say, the US doesn’t have a budget problem when it comes to health care - the primary obstacle is the policy challenge of switching to a system that does a better job at delivering care for everyone based on need rather than ability/willingness to pay. Massive cost savings follow when people are kept healthier.
My point is the money isn’t actually being spent on labor or technology - it’s just going into shareholders pockets.
I assume that any military spending would be equally inefficient.
The US government only disagrees on matters which support the average citizen. Other than that, both sides are in lockstep when it comes to voting on bills…
how do you think it has the biggest army in the world
famously poorly armed state of Israel
But when we ask for help as citizens, “how are you gonna pay for it, huh?”
This sum represents about 1.5% of the US budget in 2022.
And yet that’s too much when it’s for anything other than war.
You’re very welcome to look at the federal budget any time, where you’ll find that there’s quite a lot of non-war spending.
Have you looked at the defense budget by any chance? Have you seen the $880 billion with a big fat “B”? That’s almost a trillion a year. A billion is one thousand million. A trillion is one thousand billion. The defense budget is almost one thousand billion. Do you know how imaginary this number is? And it only costs $79Billion a year(1% of the defense budget lol) to provide free education for our people so we can have a more educated society.
I mean, sure. I’d support that, and I think most Democrats in Congress probably would, at least on some level. There are some assumptions in that model that are a little oversimplified (it’s extrapolating based on in-state public school tuition and doesn’t account for the huge explosion in demand that would come with it being free), but yeah, I don’t think you’d find that much resistance amongst Congressional Democrats.
Good luck getting it by Republicans who are convinced that universities are just woke brainwashing factories though.
I’m not really sure what the relevance of this is though. My assertion was that non-military spending is a thing that exists. 87% of all spending, actually.
Where is that 87% being spent? I’m genuinely curious? The country is literally turning into a 3rd world shithole. People struggle left and right. 70%+ of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Healthcare system is a joke. School system is a worse joke. Infrastructure is shit. Homelessness is rampant. Where is the spending? I’m confused. Not trying to argue here, just genuinely looking for answers.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/
This site from the Treasury has great info, but some highlights:
22%: Social Security
14%: Medicaid and other Department of Health and Human Services spending (health research, the FDA, FEMA, the CDC, temporary welfare for needy families, foster care, other stuff
14%: MedicareAt this point, we’ve already hit half of the federal just on social security and health spending.
13%: National defense
13%: General welfare. This is things like SNAP, WIC, SSI, the earned income tax credit, some housing assistance programs, and other welfare programs.
11%: Interest payments on debt.
5%: Veterans BenefitsThe remainder is divided a million different ways, but those are the largest categories. Social security and healthcare are by far the biggest expenses, and those costs are also expected to grow faster than the revenue that funds them, which is eventually going to cause a big problem that neither party has any interest in addressing. It should absolutely be noted that that healthcare spending is disgustingly inefficient due to the disaster that is our healthcare system, and it could be much much more efficient. But basically, a huge chunk of the money goes towards retirees. It’s probably a total coincidence that those are the ones that vote the most too.
I’ve been slightly loose with the categorizations there in order to not get bogged down in some irrelevant classification details between spending functions and government departments, but the general picture is accurate.
No shit, but a lot of that spending one team or the other is opposed to - but war? Bipartisan.
Whether you like it or not, the fact of the matter is that most Americans support defending those allies. This is not slimy Washington elites pillaging the common man’s money to fund war; this is you being a significant outlier compared to standard American opinion.
Which is fine, but don’t go pretending anything else is happening.
How about you acknowledge that Americans want healthcare and aren’t getting it because we’re told it’s too expensive?
No they don’t… You do and the media is engaged in a terrifying amount of manufactured consent, but the raw data from those same polls does not agree with that claim.
Ignoring the sampling methods used, lack of transparency on filters and other methodology, clearly biased questions, etc. The latest CBS news poll on the topic lists:
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52% believe less weapons and supplies should be sent to Israel.
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76% believe more humanitarian aid should be sent to Israel.
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57% believe more humanitarian aid should be sent to Gaza.
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56% disapprove of how the situation with Russia and Ukraine is being handled. (Though there isn’t much of a breakdown on the “how is it being mishandled…”)
A few things that should be explicitly pointed out as this is a bad poll, but it would appear the inherit bias is trying to agree with you, so the margin of error means the “true feelings of Americans” is even further in contradiction to your statement.
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Note how Isreal is kept consistent without a single reference to Netanyahu/Israeli government compared to the constant switching back and forth between “Hamas” and “Palestinian people”
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poll is 63% white, 62% of that group has “no degree”, 33% aged between 45-64 (amongst 4 categories).
So even when polling predominantly uneducated* white baby boomers who are the exact demographic that agrees the most with you, and doing the typical statistical magic the numbers still cannot be finagled in such a way as to make your statement true.
- it should be said that “uneducated” doesn’t necessarily mean ‘uninformed, stupid, etc.’ However, in this context it means they are deliberately polling non-experts who’s primary source of information is CBS/Paramount itself (or other closely related corporations) in order to manufacture consent.
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Since it’s insignificant, would you please send me $314 to cover my share?
Please attach some basic conditions like… don’t do war crimes.
One of these is not like the others.
Two of these are not being pulverized by a nuclear power at the moment.
Nonetheless, each is a proxy war interest of the US, which alone shows how it’s atrocious. The first two actively are, all three have been, and the third is the most anxiety ridden one on my end. It’d could go from third times a charm to nuke real fast