If voluntarily giving to those less fortunate is the christian thing to do then anyoneone who calls themself a christian (I'm roman catholic) should be in favour of a system of wealth redistribution that is not communist in its approach to this - i.e. if you work hard and earn a lot of money, then you get to feel the benefit of that, which is fair. 

Which was what I was actually talking about...

 

I was going to post this sometime ago in response to some guy who posted on here that "he talked to someone from Britain and that everything is great with Universal Health Care (UHC)"

Since most people talk about Canada's and England's UHC I will be using those as my example.  Some thoughts before discussion:  Where are we going to get the money for UHC?  How are we going to make the money for this?  This going to be a whole lot of dough.  The only way to do this is to raise taxes.  In our current economical situation we are in, raising taxes is the last and the worst thing we could do right now.  According to the book, FDR Folly, the "Depression was worsened and prolonged by doubling taxes, making it more expensive for employers to hire people, making it harder for entrepreneurs to raise capital, demonizing employers.....forcingup the cost of living, channeling welfare away from the poorest people and enacting labor laws."  This sounds like what is going on now.  We have way more people than both England and Canada.

Now onto UHC.  This will be very expensive program.  Both parties seem to have problems managing money and this will only give them more money to toss around and squander.

Someone on here posted that more people die here of cancer than in England, I don't feel like looking back to found out who.  I'm not sure where they got that tidbit of info.  According to James Bartholomew of the Spectator, a British magazine, "among women with breast cancer there is a 46% chance of dying from it in Britain vs a 25% chance in the U.S.  Britain has one of the worst survival rates in the advanced world," writes Bartholomew, "and the America has the best."

Bartholomew explains: "That is why those who are rich enough often go to America, leaving behind even private British healthcare."  The reason isn't because our medical schools are better.  "In America, you are more likely to be treated," states Bartholomew "and going back a stage further, you are more likely to get the diagnostic tests which lead to better treatment."

"More specifically" he writes "3/4 of Americans who've had a heart attack are give beta-blocker drugs, compared to fewer than a third in Britain.  SImilarly, American patients are more likely than British patients to have a heart condition diagnosed with an angiogram, more likely to have an artery widened with angioplasty, and more likely to get back on their feet by way of a by-pass."

An audit done by the World Health Organization, for instance, found that over half of Britain's x-ray machines were past their recommended safe time limit, and more than half the machines in an esthesiology required replacing.  Even the majority of operating tables were over 20 years old - double their life span. Robert R. Reiland, a professor of free enterprise at Robert Morris University writes "Taken as a whole, Britain's UHC system has evolved into a ramshackle structure where tests are underperformed, equipment is undersupplied, operations are underdone, and medical personnel are overworked, underpaid and overly tied down in red tape.  In other words, your chances of coming out of the America medical system alive are dramatically better than in Britain."

Here is the  opinioin of Professor Lord Robert Winston, the consultant and advocate of the NHS on the movie Sicko and UHC. When asked on BBC Radio 4 whether he recoginised the NHS as portrayed in the film, Winston replied: "No, I didn't.  Most it was filmed at my hospital (the Hammersmith in west London), which is a very good hospital but doesn't represent what the NHS is like."

Minette Marrin writing about Sicko in the Sunday Times had this to say : "I didn't recognize it either , from years of visiting NHS hospitals.  Moore painted a rosy tainted vision of spotless wards, impeccable treatment, happy patients who laugh away any suggestion of waiting in casualty and glamorous young GP who combines his devotion to his patients with a salary of 100000 pounds, a house worth 1mil, and 2 cars. You would never guess from Sicko that THE NHS IS IN DEEP TROUBLE, MIRED IN SCANDAL, and INCOMPETENCE, despite the injection of billions of pounds of taxpayers' money.  All this, and for free.  I wonder whether that grotesquely fat film maker is aware of the delicious irony that in our state run system, the government and the NHS have been having serious public discussion about the necessity of refusing to treat people who are extremely obese."  Obesity when it is advanced is very expensive to treat medically and also brings with a whole slew of other medical complications.

According to the Sunday Times: Around 11% of British purchase private health insurance.  They can't opt out of the National Health Service and still pay for it.  They then pay extra to purchase health insurance mainly because of the long waiting periods for state care.  But, when it comes to people who know the NHC system the best, the percentage with private insurance increases dramatically.  The Sunday Times reported that 55% of SENIOR DOCTORS PAY FOR MEDICAL INSURANCE" and TURN TO PRIVATE MEDICAL TREATMENT INSTEAD OF USING THE NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE."

The chairman of the British Medical Associatiion, Jonathan Fielden, said "When consultant do with their own health care is very much a personal matter.  Consultants will try to minimze the time they are away from work in order to maximize their ability to care for patients."

That little interesting tidbit brings to light one aspect of NHC that is often ignored.  Fielden is saying that doctors who become ill seek private care to reduce the time they are away from work.  Fair enough.  That benefits patients who otherwise wouldn't be treated.  The lesson here is that had these physicians been treated within the NHS they would spend less time working and more time waiting.  The waiting lines for care in the NS are infamous and well documented.  What I find interesting is the aspect of the time they spend away from work.  This is a cost of NHC that is literally off the books.  When socialist care is deemed more efficient, waiting costs are not included in the total.

Yes, the states does need adequate health care coverage.  But even if every citizen is "fully covered" the delivery of that care will still remain a problem.  In the U.S. we don't have enough preventive care treatments.  UHC is just a band-aid effect again I do think our system does need revisions.  By the time people get diagnosed with something it's already in the latter stages.  With most diseases/illnesses if you can catch them early it's will almost be cheaper.

Canada will be coming soon.  I've just typed so much and need to actually do some stuff.

re steal:

There are? People wre forced to give them money?

Last time I checked, if I don't pay taxes, men with guns will come to my house and take me to jail. 

I don't see a scenario where men from wall street will seize me if I don't give them what I worked for.

O come now, you are being unfair to Obama, the guy got into Harvard and was at the top of his class so thats gotta be worth something.  Look Republicans and Democats nominate differen candidate types.  Republicans nominate old guys who been in Washington forever democrats nominate young people who can make changes otherwise they lose.  We conservatives must be truthful to ourself and not get tricked into towing the party line. 

The media has not been "in the tank" for Obama, during the primaries I saw reverend wright on tv for two months straight and that surely cost him votes especially in ohio and appaliacha.  If anyone is getting special treatment it is mccain and palin who seem to get a free ride by pre-emptive accusations against the media of bias.  Look if Palin has a messed up life then the media ought to expose it, they did it to obama and clinton already, if palin wants to be a star it should happen to her to.

I encouraged a friend of mine to post here, but since he still hasn't, I will post a couple of his points.

Here is a list of Obama's accomplishments while in the state and US Senate: http://www.statesurge.com/members/923-barack-obama-federal
From a Digg discussion about this:
In eight years in Illinois, State Senator Obama sponsored 820 bills that became law. The Illinois Times, in a cover story, labeled Obama as “Head Of The Class” for his legislative abundance.

And in just four years as a U.S. Senator, Obama has sponsored 427 bills, and authored 152 bills. For a detailed list, follow the link (really, click on the link and scroll down, way down his list of legislative accomplishments)."

Researching the claim that "accomplishments should be listed separately", my friend looked at several professional resume sites, and none of them had any bullet points for "accomplishments" as a separate category.  They listed experience, but none where you'd list individual accomplishments that were not in the context of a job.  Since we're talking about Circuit City managers being more experienced than Obama, here's a sample resume at monster.com for the role of Customer Service Manager: http://career-advice.monster.com/sample-resumes/administrative-support/resume-customer-service-manager/home.aspx

Note the distinct lack of an "accomplishments" category.  I flipped through some of the pile of resumes that come my way, and indeed, every single one lists accomplishments at each job (e.g. "optimized some core algorithm and improved performance by 5X" or "scaled up server infrastructure to handle 1000 times more traffic", etc.).

And we shouldn't get lost in the weeds here, but this entire tanget about resumes and stems from the claim that "accomplishments are different from education and are different from getting a job".  Dr. Guy claims resumes as evidence that accomplishments are a distinctly different thing from "stuff you did while at your job" or "stuff you did while in school".  We see now that this is just false, and  reinforces my personal experience with them.  (Most resumes I have seen list notable achievements while in school under the appropriate institution in the Education section, and list notable accomplishments while at a job under the appropriate job in the Work History section.)

Does the list of legislation in my previous post count?  There also seems to be a bit of misunderstanding about "creating something of value", and I can't tell if it's intentional.  Michael Phelps has created nothing tangible, but no one would argue that he has not accomplished anything.



What about the government spending transparency issue?



Top McCain advisor and former HP CEO Carly Fiorina just recently stated that she wouldn't hire *any* of the people on either ticket to run a company, because the skillsets for CEO and POTUS are different.



I think more folks have been dragged off to jail by men with guns for filesharing music and DVDs than have been dragged off to jail for failing to pay taxes.  Microsoft paid no taxes for about 5 years or so in the early 2000s.  The Church of Scientology pays no taxes even though it's a giant for-profit pyramid scheme.

Libertarians love to trot out the "mens with guns will take you away" as an scary strawman (scarecrow?) argument against The Big Bad Government.  They fail to point out that in even in a Free Market Dream World, there would still have to be legal jurisdiction and executive power to enforce those legal decisions.  So, the RIAA can send Jean Valjean off to the work camps for sharing a song, but hey, at least you're free!



Do they pay little to nothing because they *have* little to nothing compared to yo, or because they have a *lot more* than you and had a loophole written in to the (now inscrutable) tax code?

Did you support the Iraq War?  That stuff is expensive.  Do you support the development of super duper stealth fighter jets and $100 billion missile defense shields?  That stuff is expensive.  How many interstates and highways do you drive on?  That stuff is expensive.

Even if you *want* the overhead of privatising all this stuff and dealing with separate tollway, police, fire, EMS, defense, food safety, pharma safety, chemical safety, nuclear safety, environmental monitoring, land management, science research, and foreign diplomacy companies, these things will still cost money.  Pro-privatization folks like to talk about government waste as if corporate America is a paragon of efficiency.  Sometimes I wonder if these folks have actually *been* inside the belly of the any Fortune 500 beasts to see how much ineptitude and waste pervades even the most profitable companies at the top of the food chain.

The bottom line is that there is a Gaussian distribution of work ethic among the general population, and when you assemble enough people together into a group (public or private), there will be slack and inefficiency and people who don't pull their weight.  Privatization is mostly a phantom silver bullet.  (Multiple private, competing entites *can* sometimes lead to more efficiency, but only if there was enough "slack" in the economy to support multiple concurrent efforts.)

pwang - You don't seem to understand the difference between positions in the private sector and positions in the public sector.

In the private sector, positions are generally earned by merit.  In the public sector, one gets elected which reqires a totally different set of talents.

As an employer,  someone who actually hires people, I find Obama's "resume" to be quite unimpressive.  If Obama were white, Republican and named Quayle, I suspect (know) that his "accomplishments" would be viewed very differently.

I do agree that liberals tend to view accomplishments differnetly than conservatives which is probably why conservatives run the world and liberals seek elected office.

You think so? Can you name ONE person who has been sent to jail for file sharing music and DVDs? ONE person would do. And be specific.

I don't even know what to say to this statement.  It makes it hard to continue this conversation is you're really implying that people can choose not to pay taxes.  Are you suggesting that paying taxes is voluntary now?

List them.  If you can.

You may be the best engineer in the world, bu tyour reading and writing leave a lot to be desired.

You got offended by your false assumption that I was insinuating that you had gotten your job through affirmative action (job or education, you pick).  So who was offended?  you were.  Why?  You thought someone was questioning your qualifications. so that does beg the question - since you have your degree, and have your job, why should you care what anyone thinks?  Unless it really does offend you that you believe that you did not EARN what you have. 

So the question again is - are you offended that someone questions your competancy because you earned what you have?  Or did you get what you have by special favors (AA)?  Now answer that question and we can go on with the education of the new slave masters - the Snake oil AA pushers.

Wrong!  They have had their pants sued off, but so far, I have not heard of any SS storm troopers carting them off to jail with guns.  There is still (probably not much longer especially if Castro II gets elected) rules about measured use of force.  Not always followed, but not universally (as you claim) violated either.

Unfortunately both major parties are guilty of redistributing tax dollars in such a way.

Obama is Older than Teddy Roosevelt when elected (guy on Mt. Rushmore) (R)

Obama is older than John F. Kennedy when elected                                   (D)

Obama is older than Bill Clinton when elected                                           (D)

Obama is older than U.Grant when elected                                               (R)

 

Obama is more experienced than Abraham Lincoln When elected                    (R)

 

 

They had done a lot more when elected too.