I will get a lot of hate for posting this, but I mean no ill-will, I am just passionate about these topics and some of it gets a little close to offensive. I've tried to make sure all of the offensive bits aren't directed at anyone in particular, but are more of rant towards ideas that bother me.
Young/naive people fall in love with Bernie Sanders, because his messages apply to people who have not yet been exposed to real life, for one reason or another. It's easy to go into a campaign promising all these great things (free this, free that, etc.) expecting that it will help everyone and not hurt anything. It's borderline idiotic.
"Increase minimum wage to $15 per hour!" One of the dumbest sentiments I've heard in the race, quite possibly stupider than Trump's Muslim immigration ban. People don't seem to understand that areas with low wages tend to have products for sale at lower costs (a lower cost of housing, in particular). Some people make around $15 per hour in those areas now, and have some sort of a living going for themselves, but as soon as minimum wage is increased to $15, the difference between their wage and the bottom is eliminated. Now, suddenly, their $15 per hour has the same value in terms of local purchasing ability as the person who was making $8-$9 per hour minimum wage before, which is nothing. Will the businesses raise the pay of all their employees to reflect the increase in minimum wage? Hell no, business are not going to pay out more from the bottoms of their hearts, they will try to save money any way they can. Even if they did adjust, just follow me here: Say minimum wage is $10, then it is increased to $15, now someone making $20 per hour had a purchasing power of 200% minimum wage which is now 133%, and if the business raised their wage to $25 per hour it would only be at 166% the minimum wage. You would have to have your wage increased to $30 per hour to have the same type of purchasing power as you used to, and no business is going to do that. The people hurt the most by increasing minimum wage are the people who managed to get a decent job making money over it.
Not only that, but business's are going to start looking to cut lazy workers, because since every worker must be valuable to a business to be employed, all the slack-jaw lazy ass people who are wanting the government to increase their pay will be fired because they aren't worth $15 per hour in terms of productivity. The market will eventually work itself out, but businesses sure as hell are not going to be the ones who take the hit, it will be all the hard working people who tried to get ahead in life, being slowed down by the people demanding they get paid more for nothing.
Then he also wants to tax the rich more, which, I'm not even going to argue against at this point, but you're going to trust a POLITICIAN and the government to do something good with money they stole from people who earned it? There is definitely corruption in corporations and with all the
strawberries they pull with lobbyists, but acting like imposing a high tax on high income people is also completely moronic. You're effectively insuring you will never in your lifetime, and possibly the lifetime of your entire lineage, will never become wildly rich and successful. It's easy to take from people who have when you don't, but when you have an opportunity to make money, don't complain when someone comes and takes it all and donates it to charity because they thought you had more than you deserve.
I don't like either the democrats or the republicans as they are both completely and totally corrupt. But everyone (especially college students and the jobless losers from places like Portland Oregon) need to get Bernie's 90-year-old wrinkled knob out of their throat and think about how all of his magical promises might actually come true.
This is so true. So many blatant LIES were spread about the affordable health care act by Republicans that most of my "intelligent" friends are completely against it. However, I know loads more people that only have health insurance now because of it and can actually afford the medicines and supplies they NEED to survive now.
Repubs were also so anti-Obama that they allowed the government to literally stall for days over budget issues rather than come up with some temporary compromise. I can't trust Republicans anymore, but I don't like Democrats either. USA politics really suck.
I've also had first-hand experience of people who COULD afford health insurance who now have to wait until November to get health insurance, because the idiocy of Obamacare has it so people can only sign up for Obamacare during open enrollment. (Yes, I understand risk and special enrollment periods, but its still absolutely retarded that there is no way to actually sign up, even with a penalty or something, once you have missed open enrollment). That's just one example. In the area where I live, if you have insurance 100% free, nearly every office in the area will have you waiting from 6-8 months just to see specialist or dentist or just about anything. Not to mention the fact that these places often have the worst customer service, and are pretty awful all around. Some aspects have been "okay" revolving obamacare, but in terms of it being a substantial improvement on what we had before, it is pretty terrible (don't get me started on how hospitals and other health services are being reimbursed by arbitrary "value" measures that don't have clear definitions and are instead in place in a way that leads companies to "game" the system to prop these numbers up as much as possible to get the highest reimbursement). We definitely needed reform, and it could have even been public healthcare, but Obamacare failed to do anything that great. We could have just copied Canada's healthcare system for Christ's sake.
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A question everyone forgets when it comes to making sure EVERYONE has health care, is whether or not it is morally ethical to force charity on someone. If there was a world where no one had any taxes, or any obligations, and made money completely independent of each other, is it right to force the successful ones to care for those who are not? Maybe the end justifies the means for some people, but I'm not entirely sold. At the end of the day, the crushing inevitability of death that will engulf EVERY SINGLE HUMAN LIFE EVER means that making sure people have access to healthcare may not be the most important thing in the universe. Maybe making sure we aren't actively hurting some people's lives in order to prop up others with no attempt at fairness or consent might be a bigger issue. Personally, when I eventually end up on the low side of life I don't want to feed off of others like a leech on life-support, I'd rather find use for myself, be self-sufficient, or be dead because death is something we all have to accept at some point. We can't force others to make sure we stay alive, especially because of how futile it is.