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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (6172)	2/17/2009 5:04:49 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 42652

A ponzi like scheme where the government can compel people to join, so that 1 - You don't have a lack of new entrants after awhile like you normally do in ponzi schemes, and 2 - You don't have to give crazy rates of return to encourage people to join (in fact the rate of return for anyone "joining" now, will be very poor), doesn't inevitably go bust (it can collapse, but there is nothing inevitable or automatic about such a collapse). In SS's case its so big that it will be a growing problem, but we can painfully muddle through somehow. (Again I'm not really considering the politics of it in any detail, and I'm assuming no very strong tax revolts, no real "great depression plus" economic collapse, no war so big that we fully mobilize, no one in a hundred thousand years scale natural disaster, or anything else exogenous to the SS system itself and the basic demographic and economic models behind it)

To: Lane3 who wrote (6172)	2/17/2009 6:04:36 PM
From: i-node	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

I don't think that's feasible. We might have done it differently, or not done it at all, had we known then what we know now. I wish we had. But we can't go home again. We can't undo the Ponzi paradigm we're in. No, I agree. Not in any time frame you or I could appreciate, that's for sure. But I think that the mistake Bush and others have made is to try to reverse something that is too embedded to be reversible. Well, I don't know if it was a mistake to try. But this is the problem with these kinds of social programs. They tend to grow without bound because the political incentive is to increase benefits and expand the scope of the programs. Meanwhile, the political DIS-incentive to cut expenditures makes them politically untouchable. This is why I have complained about Obama creating new entitlements with this stimulus program. Even small entitlements become big ones over time, and cannot under any circumstances be curtailed. Today, we put maybe 8 Million people on the public dole for their health care, a figure which over time will undoubted double, triple and more. We're already broke due to Medicare. Bush added Part D, and for the life of me I don't know what he was thinking when he did it.