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

To: Road Walker who wrote (24335)	7/25/2012 11:01:46 AM
From: Lane3	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Should only the compassionate carry the societies burden? The flip side of that is not necessarily A taking from B to give to C. This is not binary. Sure, the compassionate give easily and others don't. But there are ways to get most of the others to chip in short of government force. When society expects it of them, most will comply even if grudgingly, to avoid the burden be it in shame, loss of status, loss of economic opportunity, whatever penalty society chooses to impose. Sure, there are some who still will not contribute but there are always outliers and outliers don't matter unless they are destructive, which has criminal consequences, or their numbers reach critical mass. The use of government force is counter-productive in that it produces resistance among both the unwilling and those who would otherwise be willing but resent the heavy-handedness in practice or on principle. Tax avoidance, the most obvious manifestation of that resistance, is rampant. There's nothing constructive about fostering that.

To: Road Walker who wrote (24335)	7/25/2012 11:26:41 AM
From: skinowski	4 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

I think, RW, you need to recognize just how power greedy, mischievous and dangerous government can be, even when it acts with so called good intentions. I doubt that you approve of the fact that government employees, considering pensions and benis, are getting so much higher compensation than people working in private businesses. I doubt that you approve of politicians spending literally trillions more than what they take in in taxes. If you agree on a few points like these, we may find ourselves much closer politically. Not on the same page, but closer. We need government, but it tends to run away and... risk getting us all into big trouble.

To: Road Walker who wrote (24335)	7/28/2012 11:01:01 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42652

To a great degree it was the case historically, and is currently, and would be more the case currently if it wasn't for government efforts (which crowd out some private efforts) and high government taxes (which reduce private resources for charity, and also create an impression in people that they already gave). I'm not saying you don't get more assistance to the less well off, by doing it through forcible taxation and government redistribution, you clearly do. OTOH you also get a lot of fraud, and you get dependency traps where the cutoff of benefits, and the kick in of taxes, and mean that people see little benefit from returning to work, or from improving their work position to make more. If you count the cut off of benefits as a tax (it isn't but has similar disincentive effects), the effective marginal tax rate is more than that for any other group and can be over 100% at certain income levels for those who are receiving all the benefits they are legally entitled to. And even outside of that taking from those who earn more to give to those who don't earn, disincentives wealth creation on both ends. I'm not saying we should get rid of social programs. Just as they cause problems they also relieve serious problems for a lot of people. But its important to recognize the problems as well, to try to minimize them, and to look skeptically at expansions of government that could expand them in scope or intensity.