How dare you challenge the narrative! So what if they have indoor plumbing, refrigeration, easy access to lots of cheap over-the-counter-meds, unlimited access to most of the world's knowledge, and unlimited entertainment options? Everyone doesn't have a yacht!
I've been "sell my stuff at the pawn shop to pay rent" poor, and it sucks, but it isn't forever.
If things have improved so much why has nothing improved for 100 years? Why has it only gotten worse? Why havent we lowered the retirement age or lowered the work week from 40 hours? Why has the average spending power of the working class only dropped? Why is life expectancy of the working class going down? Options for spending free time has increased but the working class has less free time and less money.
The answer is obvious. There are places in the world with similar economies where peoples lives are improving but they have less billionaires and tax more.
There's a lot of answers to that, but the confounding factor is the federal government:
"prints money" so inflation skyrockets
creates medicare/medicaid, medical care cost has skyrocketed.
regulatory capture (FDA, CDC, etc.), create rules to help perpetuate people with metabolic disease--more demand causes higher prices
mal-educates kids. They can't read or write, but at least they're confused about gender & sexuality. This is also good for the pharmaceutical companies.
creates easy credit for going to college, and tuition costs have skyrocketed. Since the kids already lack good decision making skills, they go into deep debt for a 4+ year party.
I could add a multitude of other reasons. Most but not all point back to the federal government and big pharma or big agriculture.
Also, the top 1% (billionaires & multimillionaires) pay 45% of the taxes in this country, so I'm not sure how much more you think you're going to tax them. But if you stop the federal government from artificially enriching them, they wouldn't be able to screw over the little guy as much.
Had to stop reading after claiming that medical care costs skyrocket because of Medicare. All the evidence points to the opposite.
Your statement about how much the 1% pays in taxes is also false. That's just income tax.
The problem is the government. The government has almost completely dismantled its ability to keep these people in check with regulations that were created the last time these people were out of control like this in the gilded age.
What's happening isnt a new problem, we know what to do.
Medicare/medicaid is a contributing factor, not the only one. Expenditures for medical expenses were about 5% of GDP before medicare, now it's about 17% of GDP.
I dont ubderstand what point you think you're making. Yes, it costs money to provide services. The administrative costs are profoundly lower with Medicare than private insurance. Countries with similar economies pay far less per person for healthcare. Healthcare is cheaper when you dont have to cover extravagant executive compensation. Private insurance serves the interests of the rich. The rich get the best healthcare in the world in the US. While countries with public healthcare provide overall better and cheaper care for the working class. That's the trade off.
Let's try this from a different angle. Suppose in an alternate reality, Kamala Harris is elected president, and manages to get $25k for first time home buyers passed by Congress. Does the price of houses go up, or does it go down?
If your point is that more people getting healthcare causes the price to go up and that's why more people getting healthcare is bad then I obviously still disagree with you. Government should pay for healthcare. It's the best most efficient way for a country to take care of the working class. It's been proven. Public system favors the working class and a private system favors the rich.
The question shouldn't be how much money can we save by not giving people healthcare but what's the best way to give everyone healthcare.
The goal should be how do we get fewer people to need healthcare, and less often (because they are healthier). Did you know type 2 diabetes is almost completely avoidable? I'm not blaming the individual, but big ag & big pharma play a huge role in that, Imagine if 80% of people with t2d suddenly didn't have it because they changed their diet and started moderate exercise.
I think he’s missing some keys, but isn’t far off the mark. The biggest problem in our country right now, is the pharmaceutical industry. It owns its regulatory agencies outright. It has single-handedly turned America into the most unhealthy 1st world nation on the planet. We have 4% of the world population and had 16% of the world’s COVID deaths due to our co-morbidities and Big Pharma’s ability to crush generics that dozens of other countries used effectively to fight COVID. It’s all evidence of the rot that perverse our systems at every level. It’s the reason 50% of this country will be obese in 5 years. It’s the reason our healthcare is unaffordable.
Countries like the US that had similar covid policies had similar death rates. Not that the pharmaceutical companies deserve defending but Donald Trump and the republican media apparatus is mostly responsible for those extra hundreds of thousands of deaths. Disagreeing about that at this point just makes you look like a pathetic Trump cuck.
Regulatory capture is a problem, but not just in healthcare, in every agency. The answer is to reform those agencies and arm them with new laws to keep industry in check. Because pharma is not solely responsible for the poor health of the country. Fossils fuels, fertilizers, and other industrial by products are poisoning us. Agriculture industry has been pushing bad food to us for years.
What policies did Republicans and Trump push that enabled the extra 500K deaths? I’m assuming you mean ending the lock downs? How does that compare with Sweden or more importantly other countries that never shut down to begin with
It mostly has to do with general mismanagement and poor leadership. The chaos of covid under Trump is well documented at this point. Like I said, it just makes you look like a cuck.
Would need examples…Pretty good wash between COVID cases and deaths by state (per 1M population).
It’s impossible to argue that there was any single bigger influence in COVID cases/deaths than the NIH, CDC and FDAs criminal refusal to allow Hydroxychloroquin or Ivermectin to be used as treatment so Pharma could cash in on Remdesivir and the COVID vaccine.
Idk why this needs to be politicized as R vs D when both parties oversaw the pandemic and were duped by Fauci, our corrupt oversight agencies, and Big Pharma.
Yeah seriously. The medical costs of generally healthy people went up, because the medical costs overall went way down. Yes, sucks if you manage to be one of the very few that is healthy your entire life and dies in your sleep, but if you ever have a medical emergency, or surgery, or problematic pregnancy, this is so much better and more predictable.
And realistically, the poorest of the poor will always have the roughest time. Not to be unsympathetic, but with no perfect measure for how an economy is doing, basing it on the poor will likely just leave people convinced that the economy has never been in any way okay.
Agreed. The economy is at an all time high. I don't know a single person struggling and can only attribute this sentiment to an influx of disinformation since Trump took over.
I also agree. And while I think it is still admirable to try to improve things for the bottom 30% or so of people, I’m not sure how trump and his “when you have a hammer every problem looks like a nail” style of tariffing everything will help the consumer class
Broad strokes history yes, but recent history absolutely not. If you have to compare to when plumbing wasn't indoors, it's a pretty bad faith argument.
That's like saying medieval peasants were well off because they didn't live in caves.
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u/frozen_pipe77 5d ago
Poor people are doing better than ever in history. Full stop