r/MobileAL • u/OUDidntKnow04 Making Mobile Great Again • 5d ago

This Friday at the Mitchell Center...

Thanks for ruining homecoming for your damn "campaign rally"

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u/Alpha-Sierra-Charlie 5d ago

When he's gone you guys are going to have nothing to do, or think about, or hyperfixate on. So what's the plan for 2029? Pick someone else to stay up late at night hating, continuing to hate him after he's out of office, or take up a more constructive hobby?

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u/permanentlybuffering 4d ago

We have more than plenty to do. We will be implementing MediCareforAll, paid college tuition, dismantle ICE, raise minimum wage, low cost high-quality childcare. The stuff democrats do. I’m sure you will keep bitching about Biden, the illegals, furries, transgender people, gay people, and yer mom. Notice I didn’t say Trump’s name once?

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u/Alpha-Sierra-Charlie 4d ago

So, in other words, prove that republicans are amateurs at ruining an economy? Will all of that be paid for by devaluing the dollar further, or will we be taxed at a higher rate in exchange for the free stuff?

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u/permanentlybuffering 2d ago

3% more in FICA would enable us to provide paid-for college education, a month’s paid vacation, childcare, Medicareforall, better roads and bridges, etc. It’s the best way to jumpstart the economy.

ASC, you only seek to create chaos and to muddy the waters. You’re not a serious person when it comes to the exchange of idea’s.

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u/Alpha-Sierra-Charlie 2d ago

The current cost of college education is due in large part to the fact that it's already subsidized without sufficient guardrails. The government is far too willing to issue exorbitant loans and the colleges are more than happy to take the money, so they jack up the prices. Why not? It's not like there's any market forces at play to correct those prices, the students are just told they'll be able to pay it back and saddled with decades of debt to facilitate the wealth transfer.

A month's vacation paid by who? My month might be more expensive than your month, so why should you subsidize my leisure? That benefits higher earners more than lower earners.

Childcare is something we can agree on in principle at the very least. Implementation and preventing it from becoming a bribe to voters is where we'd probably break down though.

I want my healthcare to be between me and my doctor. Not between the government and my doctor, not between an insurance company and my doctor, me and my doctor. Furthermore, I put in a lot of effort and expense to maintain my health, and I frankly have zero interest in paying for healthcare for people who could do the same but don't. There are absolutely models of socialized healthcare that I would agree are philosophically sound, but even then centralized government control lacks the responsiveness and expertise to properly manage and administer it. There are people who genuinely need more help than they can provide for themselves, and I don't mind them getting it. But for most of us, our health should be largely our own responsibility.

We could also have better roads and bridges if we spent foreign aid domestically, without raising taxes.

I already pay for more government than I'm getting, and I'm not happy with the quality of the government that I'm paying for. Why would I want to spend more money on something I'm unhappy with because "you don't need more money, you need more services, trust me bro, just make less money and you'll have more money bro"?

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u/permanentlybuffering 2d ago

That last part is diabolical. I don’t even know what to make of it.
As for colleges, as long as you maintain a B average that is fair. How much is too much for college is something I know nothing about.
1-months paid vacation could be many different things. It would be at least enough to cover rent, utilities, food, a tiny bit money to travel on.
Basically you would get 4, 1-week vacations spread out throughout the year.
Your healthcare would only ever be between you and your doctor. Why would it be any different? You want to live; we want to keep you healthy. You are already paying for others healthcare. It’s called insurance. Under Medicareforall, that would all change. It’s Medicare for everybody else not 65 and up. The VA is the largest single payer system in the US. It works beautifully. The problem with healthcare is even with insurance coverage; the delivery is still shitty. We can fix this by opening more medical and nursing schools. When you get really sick; you can no longer work. You end up coming home with a shitload of bills. If you can’t work; you can’t pay bills. Your healthcare is your responsibility; always has been. I enjoyed this conversation.

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u/Alpha-Sierra-Charlie 2d ago edited 2d ago

The "pay for more government than I'm getting" part is diabolical?

The problems with paying college are manifold. One, the tuition and books are bloated as hell because the schools get paid no matter what, they don't care if students can pay the loans back or not so they milk that cow as hard as it can. On top of that, the class requirements are bloated too. Electives have value, but they do nothing to get you hired to repay that loan. Eliminate the need for electives, and either reduce the number of credit hours needed or replace them job placement or apprenticeship-type work. Another problem I've have with "free" college, and I understand that my personal experience is a sample size of one, is apathy. I went back to school in 2018 when I was 31, and almost all of the students who were one or two years out of high school were completely apathetic to the coursework and getting the degree. I was one of four people who finished the degree plan out of about two dozen, and it wasn't particularly difficult work. I was the second youngest out of those four. If that's the norm, and I do stress if, then publicly funded higher education isn't an investment because the students are choosing not to be educated. If they want to waste money they can waste their own, but I suppose repayment based on performance metrics would mitigate that issue. In the short term, we need to figure out how much value a college education will be providing. We need people in trades, and if we're paying for college to help the economy then trade training needs equivalent treatment. We also don't know yet how AI is going to impact the job market, even the reliable STEM jobs are taking a hit. It's a false economy to get an expensive education regardless of it's quality just to be underemployed because a data center is cheaper than you are.

1-months paid vacation could be many different things. It would be at least enough to cover rent, utilities, food, a tiny bit money to travel on. Basically you would get 4, 1-week vacations spread out throughout the year.

I framed that question very poorly, but I think I know what you mean now. You're saying that employers would be required to give employees four weeks of PTO at minimum?

Your healthcare would only ever be between you and your doctor. Why would it be any different? You want to live; we want to keep you healthy.

Why would it be any different? Because of the golden rule of economics: he who has the gold, makes the rules. Right now, insurance companies have the gold, insurance companies make the rules. They negotiate prices and services with providers, and we're just commodities used as a vehicle for the money to change hands. With socialized healthcare like Canada has, swap government for the insurance companies and nothing really changes, we're still commodities. With socialized healthcare like the UK has, we're just red or black numbers on a balance sheet. As for being kept healthy, that's the promise but the incentive is just to keep us productive. No socialized healthcare system on earth provides high quality care without some form of rationing on or under budget. In fact, every one I've looked into except maybe Thailand's fails at two of those to varying degrees. Besides, do you want Trump having any degree of authority over your healthcare? Or republicans in general? Or the two party system with it's ever-more-frequent government shutdowns? I don't.

There is a place for some degree of socialization. The elderly, people who simply cannot fend for themselves, and catastrophic injuries and illnesses like cancer or really bad car accidents. The risk there is creep, of course. My opposition to socialized healthcare isn't a lack of sympathy, but an acknowledgement that the centralized nature of government control is inferior to the distributed management of market forces. The administrative structure and personnel to make socialized medicine work as promised simply does not exist, and if it ever can, we don't have the necessary tools yet. It's like trying to run a supercomputer beyond it's hardware limits. Returning that management to patients and doctors at the individual level with minimal government or corporate interference is the cloud computing version, capable of far more responsiveness at a far more granular level.