BBO Discussion Forums: Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? - BBO Discussion Forums

As you seem to acknowledge, healthcare is complicated. There is an unlimited demand for healthcare, especially if you include mental health, dentistry, vision, cosmetic medicine & (as Hillary promised) give coverage to the 20M+ non-citizens living in the US illegally.

If the government pays for gender reassignment surgery and all associated medicine, you may see a huge increase in health care costs as some people who previously lived with their current gender decide to take advantage of it.

Good grief Winstonm! Two things: In your post, you said "The people who voted for Trump appear to be uninterested in facts"; and now you're suggesting that in order to understand the essential meaning of words like "supporter" which is not the same as "voter" and the default rules governing the implicit use of "all" vs "some" we have to visit the dark corners of the twitter universe. This strange use of language by you is worrisome. Berlusconi voters woke up. So will Trump voters, especially if we shift the discussion to issues. I think you're underestimating the power of the water cooler to lead the way.

I'd like to think that if I saw any Hitler-like antics, I would start a campaign of friends and acquaintances writing to congressmen to put a stop to it.

If the government pays for gender reassignment surgery and all associated medicine, you may see a huge increase in health care costs as some people who previously lived with their current gender decide to take advantage of it.

I tried to find out whether it was currently covered and read several articles. They give me inconsistent answers - some say it's covered; some say in theory it's covered but in practice you probably can't get it, and some say that politicians hope to get it covered.

You seem to be pretending that the ACA is working great. It's not!

As you seem to acknowledge, healthcare is complicated. There is an unlimited demand for healthcare, especially if you include mental health, dentistry, vision, cosmetic medicine & (as Hillary promised) give coverage to the 20M+ non-citizens living in the US illegally.

So instead of telling us that you don't believe a word Trump says, how about telling us what your solution is. And tell us how you'd pay for it. And tell us how you'd get it passed.

It starts with both sides agreeing not to demonize the other side. And with rejecting money from lobbyists who work for the AMA or for Big Pharma. Since none of that will ever happen, it seems inevitable that we are doomed to have a broken health care system NO MATTER WHO IS IN CHARGE.

Doctors are some of the smartest people around. Do any of them come up with and promote affordable sensible proposals on how THEIR PROFESSION should operate? No. Because they're happy with the status quo, no matter how unsustainable that system might be.

Good idea. A good start would be not to claim, without any shred of evidence, that millions of undocumented immigrants are both stupid and malicious enough to commit voter fraud.

I understand that there are limits to what i can reasonably expect the government, aka the citizens of the nation, to do for me. Burger King gives me a 10% senior discount on my Whopper. That's nice. I don't expect a free Whopper.

And I don't trust this deal with Carrier. In post 3372 Y66 cites an article . I haven't read it in detail but the general idea seems to match mine. Whatever the benefits of this one deal with this one company, this is an approach that spells trouble down the line. It might work fine if you are a real estate developer dealing with a mobbed up union, but I would like us to try for better.

Look who agrees with you.

I'd like to think that if I saw any Hitler-like antics, I would start a campaign of friends and acquaintances writing to congressmen to put a stop to it.

If the government pays for gender reassignment surgery and all associated medicine, you may see a huge increase in health care costs as some people who previously lived with their current gender decide to take advantage of it.

I tried to find out whether it was currently covered and read several articles. They give me inconsistent answers - some say it's covered; some say in theory it's covered but in practice you probably can't get it, and some say that politicians hope to get it covered.

I had to laugh at the irony of the whole credibility thing - I was told that I lost credibility when I posted about Hillary being involved with murders. I was convinced that this is unlikely, and am taking the stance that it is unlikely with my conservative friends. Now I'm losing credibility with them (their point being that it's so obvious that Hillary was involved with murders and I'm trying to convince them otherwise, so what other lies am I propagating?)

When the modern Tea Party movement coalesced in the early days of the Obama presidency, its allusion to the political grievances of the protesters in Boston Harbor a couple of hundred years earlier seemed plausible enough: Its members felt that their taxes were too high and their interests not adequately represented by the remote authorities in Washington.

But the election of 2016 presents a challenge to that historical lineage. The home states to the Tea Party are actually doing great on the taxation and representation front. It’s the progressive blue states that should be protesting.

Start with the Electoral College. It has always deviated from the one-person-one-vote system that most Americans imagine they live in, but demographic shifts in recent years have made its prejudices more conspicuous, culminating in the striking gap between Hillary Clinton’s decisive popular vote victory and her Electoral College loss. Thanks to the two extra votes delivered to each state for its two senators, the Electoral College gives less populated states a higher weight, per capita, than it gives more populated states in the decision of who should be the next president.

This was always a betrayal of one-person-one-vote equality, in that a voter in rural Wyoming has more than three times the power of a voter in New Jersey, the country’s most densely populated state. But those imbalances have become far more glaring, thanks to a filter bubble more pronounced than anything on Facebook: the “big sort” that has concentrated Democrats in cities and inner-ring suburbs, and Republicans in exurbs and rural counties.

The right way to think about the political conflict in this country is not red state versus blue state, but red country versus blue city. And yet we are voting in a system explicitly designed to tip the scales toward the countryside.

But that’s only part of the imbalance. When the founders were plotting the Electoral College, more urban states to the north had significant debt, while the rural Southern states were in better financial shape, thanks in part to the free labor of slavery. Recall the line from “Cabinet Battle #1” from the musical “Hamilton”:

“If New York’s in debt —

Why should Virginia bear it? Our debts are paid, I’m afraid

Don’t tax the South cuz we got it made in the shade”

There’s a straight line that connects that caricature of more urban Northern states living beyond their means in the late 1700s to Ronald Reagan’s welfare queens in the 1980s: the prevailing sense that the big cities are dependent on government bailouts and benefits, while the less dense regions live responsibly. That sketch might have been accurate two centuries ago (at least if you took slavery out of the equation) but it bears no resemblance to the current economic map of the United States, where the major cities are now overwhelmingly the engines of economic growth and wealth creation — and also tax revenue.

For complicated reasons — some of which have to do with rural poverty, some of which have to do with the basic physics of supporting infrastructure in low-density regions — a disproportionate amount of per capita federal spending and benefits now flow down to the low-density states. According to a study by the Tax Foundation conducted several years ago, for every dollar New Jersey pays in federal taxes, it receives 61 cents in benefits and other federal spending. For the same dollar of taxes Wyoming spends, it gets $1.11 back.

Put those two trends together and you have a grievance worthy of the original Tea Party: more taxation with less representation. The urban states are subsidizing the rural states, and yet somehow in return, the rural states get more power at the voting booth.

You can represent the injustice of this arrangement mathematically. Think of it as two different kinds of return on investment: how much does each state receive for every dollar it pays in taxes, and how much Electoral College influence does each state get for each vote cast. Take the average of those two data points and you have a measure of which states are getting shortchanged by the system. Call it the disenfranchisement index.

The states that rank at the top of this list are the ones that are paying the highest proportion of the country’s bills while ranking lowest in terms of voting power in the Electoral College. The first 12 on the list have all voted for the Democratic candidate in at least two of the last three elections, and all but two of them went for Mrs. Clinton in 2016: New Jersey, Minnesota, Illinois, Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, Wisconsin, Michigan, Connecticut, California, Washington and Oregon.

Those states make up the overwhelming majority of Hillary Clinton’s Electoral College support in 2016. They are also paying billions of dollars of taxes and receiving only a fraction back in benefits and other federal spending. By contrast, 19 of the 25 most empowered (and largely rural) states went for Mr. Trump.

The gap between the two extremes is remarkable. South Dakota, one of the most empowered states in the country, received almost twice the return on taxes as California, the country’s most populated state, while also commanding nearly twice as much power per capita in the Electoral College. If anyone should be declaring themselves the heirs to the Boston patriots who rebelled against the unjust taxation of King George, it’s the big city blue state citizens who are funding a system that by law undercounts their votes.

To date, wealthy states like California, New York and New Jersey have not expressed much outrage at this situation, in part because they have experienced less economic anxiety than some of the struggling red states and in part because the injustice has not been as visible during the Obama years, thanks to his Electoral College victories. But as our cities get wealthier and more diverse and begin to realize how the system is genuinely “rigged” against them, tectonic forces may well be unleashed.

If a Trump administration that urban states voted overwhelmingly against starts curtailing voting rights and rolling back drug-law reform, reneging on the Paris climate accord, deporting immigrants and appointing justices that favor overturning Roe v. Wade, states like California and Massachusetts are sure to start asking hard questions about why they are subsidizing a government that doesn’t give them an equal vote.

There is little doubt that some local elections can be compromised - although I would say it is much more difficult now that it was say in 1950, prior to the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act. Some areas of the country (Chicago and Lousianna, to name 2) have a sordid history when it comes to local politics.

That said, interfering with a national election is a different ballgame.

Also, simply because someone advocated a position does not mean he encouraged illegal activity - any more than Trump advocating for a return to waterboard torture is a war crime. People, even mayors, can express an opinion and even advocate for that opinion. But did any illegals actually vote in that mayoral election? Is there any evidence that the mayor in question tried to aid any illegal immigrants to vote illegally? These are the questions that need to be asked.

By far and away the largest single component of health care costs relates to efforts to preserve and extend the last months of life of a sick patient. The use of extraordinary measures, often spent on people with no or virtually no quality of life...sometimes on people with no consciousness at all....far dwarves giving free gender-reassignment to all who will flock to have it should it become almost free....all those millions and millions of unhappy people trapped in the body of the wrong gender.

By far and away the largest single component of health care costs relates to efforts to preserve and extend the last months of life of a sick patient. The use of extraordinary measures, often spent on people with no or virtually no quality of life...sometimes on people with no consciousness at all....far dwarves giving free gender-reassignment to all who will flock to have it should it become almost free....all those millions and millions of unhappy people trapped in the body of the wrong gender.

Where do you get these notions?

Take a guess where the US ranks in average life expectancy in the world. With a system that is by far and away the most expensive in the world, where do you think it ranks as of 2016?

The good news is that it ranks ahead of Cuba (by one place) and Albania (by a handful).

It ranks 31st.

Canada, with our horrible single payer nationalized system, and huge waiting lists for elective surgery, ranks 12th and Canadians live, on average, 3 years longer than Americans.

In terms of the top 35 or so countries by economic standards, the US has the 5th worst infant mortality rate.

Somehow I don't see gender reassignment surgery as the main reason.

You Americans spend hundreds of thousands per patient keeping terminally ill wealthy or well-insured patients alive for an extra month or two, while denying reasonable preventative care to tens of millions of poor people, in a society in which socio-economic mobility is virtually non-existent, and Republicans are poised to cut healthcare for the poor even more.

And you are worried about transgender people getting surgery.

Btw, do you know how long it took to find these facts, compiled by the UN? 60 seconds....it took that long because I googled firstly life expectancy and secondly infant mortality.

Getting facts isn't that difficult, you know.

Objectives. The United States has the highest prevalence of obesity and one of the lowest life expectancies among high-income countries. We investigated the relationship between these 2 phenomena.

Methods. We estimated the fraction of deaths attributable to obesity by country, age, and sex and reestimated life tables after removing these deaths. To allow for a possible secular decline in obesity risks, we employed alternative risks from a more recent period.

Results. In our baseline analysis, obesity reduced US life expectancy at age 50 years in 2006 by 1.54 years (95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.37, 1.93) for women and by 1.85 years (95% CI = 1.62, 2.10) for men. Removing the effects of obesity reduced the US shortfall by 42% (95% CI = 36, 48) for women and 67% (95% CI = 57, 76) for men, relative to countries with higher life expectancies. Using more recently recorded risk data, we estimated that differences in obesity still accounted for a fifth to a third of the shortfall.

Conclusions. The high prevalence of obesity in the United States contributes substantially to its poor international ranking in longevity.

Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people. —Federalist 10

Now the high-flying song and dance man, of manic energy and ravenous narcissism and colossal neediness, will take the oath as our forty-fifth president. The lobbyists are gathering, the would-be courtiers, the place-servers, for his campaign was a ragged pickup team, a tenth the size of Clinton’s, and he was spurned by much of the Republican establishment that would normally stand eager to staff the government—though some of them now are showing themselves eager enough to join. The grasping after emoluments is a great story, Washington in the dawning of the Trump Age a picaresque novel in the making. Even as we watch, political outsiders are rushing in from the wilderness, eager to turn his fantasies, from immigration to trade to national security, into reality, a reality in which swastikas and hate crimes are popping up around the country, and local politicians are talking darkly of “sanctuary cities.”

And yet in a real sense the principal story worth telling is still him. We are now all in the prey of that aberrant personality, of that vast and never-to-be satisfied need. “Everywhere Donald Trump turns, he sees Donald Trump,” said Mark Singer, as quoted by Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher in Trump Revealed.

He doesn’t see the other guy much. It becomes really hard to distinguish [how much] of the promotion and publicity…is good for business and how much of it is to fill that hollowness inside of him.

Now filling that hollowness is our job. No surprise that the president-elect, faced with selecting four thousand reasonably qualified people to fill the government and developing a policy or two that stands a chance of being enacted, has talked about undertaking a “victory tour,” revisiting the states he won, once again surfing those screaming crowds that plainly offer him the real-time affirmation he craves.

When he returns he will have the choice of facing the contradictions he has littered like breadcrumbs behind him. A promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants while building a “beautiful and impenetrable wall” to keep them out of the country. A vow to bring back the factories and industrial jobs by dismantling trade agreements long since become settled law. A promise to deliver great health care at a fraction of the cost of Obamacare. A threat to “bomb the *****” out of the Islamic State and reinstitute waterboarding and kill the families of terrorists. A pledge to cut taxes by $6 trillion even while spending trillions more rebuilding the country’s roads and bridges and airports, and “rebuilding our military”—while also eliminating the deficit and reducing the national debt.

He is a builder, Donald Trump, or anyway he used to be, before he became a reality television star and a manager of his brand. (“I’m very good at this,” he told Leslie Stahl on Sixty Minutes. “It’s called construction.”) To put people to work across the country pouring cement in his name, rebuilding the country under the grandeur of Trump, may well be his redemption, supplying at least some jobs to the working people who long for a leader who “finally will do something for us.” The program will spotlight his ideological obtuseness, for can he rebuild the country’s roads and bridges, can he build his bright new airports, while also delivering trillions of dollars in tax cuts to well-to-do Americans? Congressional Republicans, for whom the tax cuts count more than anything else, will insist on making compensating cuts in spending. These cannot be found without eviscerating the programs, including Medicare and Social Security, that Trump the populist has vowed to protect. The contradiction is stark and it lies squarely in the distance Trump defined from Republican Party orthodoxy at every rally he held.7 If he is really for working men and women, he will be forced to prove it and to do it very early on.

By such decisions will he define himself. He sees himself as the artist of the deal but he has shown he rarely takes opposition as legitimate, having learned his politics at the knee of Roy Cohn, the exemplar of the “go to hell” philosophy—if they screw you, screw them twenty times harder—and the master of the politics of personal destruction. Trump’s assumption of the mantle of the birther movement, which marked his self-creation as a politician, was pure Cohn, as were the stunningly brutal personal attacks on the Clintons: She lies and she lies and she lies again.

His blithe lack of respect for speaking the truth, his indifference to the strictures of the public record, are unprecedented in an American president and can find their parallels only in European leaders of the 1930s. In this as in other matters, there is no reason to expect a wholesale transformation when candidate Trump becomes President Trump. After all—in that ringing affirmation that he must hear echoing always in his ears—he won. Everyone told him he was destroying himself with feuds and attacks and angry tweets and in the end he won. Why would he change, even if he could?

What will change will be his power. He inherits a presidency that has been vastly inflated by the war on terror policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. It is not the least of ironies that Trump will have vast powers because his predecessor has chosen not to restrict but to normalize the powers cultivated by the “wartime president” who preceded him.8 Donald Trump will inherit a government on a permanent wartime footing, actively fighting in six countries (Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and Afghanistan), using means both public and secret—including drone strikes and attacks by covert special forces—and doing so with the benefit of never-ending war powers granted by Congress. He will have all the powers conferred by permanent war, by a greatly expanded CIA and NSA, and by a national security establishment that since 2001 has nearly doubled in size and has long since escaped the gaze of democratic scrutiny.

When he speaks, especially in the face of opposition, he will not be shy to remind the citizens that it is their commander in chief who is speaking. One can imagine those reminders coming fast and loud should there be, for example, the terrorist attacks from which he, the strongman, the law and order candidate, has vowed to safeguard the country. Or even in the face of huge demonstrations that might follow the shooting of a citizen of color, or a series of them, by police.

Donald Trump has been the shatterer of norms. Thus far it has been enough. Will he become the breaker of laws? Will he find it necessary? Scarcely a decade and a half ago George W. Bush, when he determined that the country’s interest demanded that he torture prisoners, simply found a way to have his government declare legal what was not. It may well be that Trump will do the same. At his rollicking rallies across the country, he has made vows to hundreds of thousands of screaming supporters, and now the eager courtiers are gathering, including figures like Bannon and Flynn and Sessions, among others long regarded as extreme, to put his words into policy and law.

We will see how that goes. It seems predictable, though, that as Trump encounters opposition, as he proves unable to fulfill the grandeur of his promises, he will strike back—it is his nature—and we will see American institutions tested. If they prove strong, there are ways for Trump to circumvent them. The enormous rallies offer one way. The cries of “Traitor!” give sign of another way. Trump is an improviser, a performer, a creator of new worlds. The narcissistically damaged actor, the high-flying song and dance man: even he can scarcely know what is to come.