You can comfortably afford the best available health insurance. You can comfortably afford very good life insurance and income protection insurance. You can comfortably afford to save a substantial amount for emergencies and retirement.
You're in a completely different situation from someone on $30k a year, who is undoubtedly living paycheck-to-paycheck. For you, a broken boiler or a major engine repair is a near-trivial expense. For someone on $30k, that same expense might put them into debt for months or years. If the mailman brings you an unexpected utility bill or parking ticket, you're not faced with the choice of skipping meals or going into debt.
Even on not-so-good insurance, isn't this why out-of-pocket maximums exists? I'm not a fan of the current system of healthcare insurance, and I'm not an apologist for how these companies push costs back onto people. However out-of-pocket maximum exists so that you don't go bankrupt for a catastrophic event that requires substantial care over the course of a year. It will vary from carrier to carrier, but I doubt a you'll ever pay more than $20k on a year of treatment for lowered tiered plans. With $300k, this person's cap is more likely to be between $5k and $10k. That's going to sting a bit, but $10k is still only 3% of the total income.
I don't deny that a disabling event can really screw things up for a family, but even insurance has its limit on how much they can screw you.
But also:
> On $300k a year, either you're not really precarious or you're making utterly reckless financial decisions.
Why not start with the $30k a year household:
Hot water? What a luxury! Half the world can't afford drinking water.
Car engine? They can use a bicycle like they do in India.
Utility bills? Just bring in some chickens into your home to warm it up.
With enough will and prudent planning you can make a dollar a day stretch much further than you could imagine. Just like you are suggesting I spend my life figuring out ways to live better in a system broken by design.
In a sane country I wouldn't have to worry about insurance and the people making a tenth less than me wouldn't worry about cars, boilers or bills, because there would be public options for all of those things.
Wealthier people skew Republican, and that's not just the 1%. OP's example of the school districts is another example. Still another is the fact that, if you look in any city in America, the wealthy (but not 1%er) areas have better roads, better parks, and better everything in terms of public infrastructure. I have a friend who works at the local power company who outright says that whenever there is a storm that takes out power, the wealthy areas come first for repairs, right after hospitals and police stations. Not, you know, the most populated areas or anything.
And it gets worse still, when the 20% try to redirect blame at the 1%. Because who are these 20%ers anyway? They're lawyers, managers, mid-level executives, financiers, maybe developers for banks, big ad firms, or VC-owned boondoggles. In short, they are the white-collar "hands" providing the services that allow the 1% to exert the level of control they do over the whole system.
To hear the 20% disclaim all responsibility for the state of inequality in the country is very similar to how the head of HR or IT tells you "well, I really can't do anything about anything, it's just Policy, set by our betters". But they are enabling all of it.
This depends on your state's economy. "In poor states, rich people are much more likely than poor people to vote for the Republican presidential candidate, but in rich states (such as Connecticut), income has a very low correlation with vote preference" [1].
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1010426
It is well-known that urban areas lean Democratic, and richer states are more urban. Thus the phenomenon may be reflecting urbanization rather than state wealth.
Have a look at the period 1950-1970. If we were to tax corporations at the same rate as they were in that golden period we would not have a national deficit.
>Where's the evidence that this solidarity ever existed?
https://web.stanford.edu/class/polisci120a/immigration/Feder...
1950, 1960 again.
However, in the present day, I don't think it is just the 1% who are against a corporate tax increase. That would hit IRAs, pensions, and investments for those who can afford such things.
As I said: I would happily pay 80% taxes if I knew that when I needed it most the welfare state would have my back, but I know that it won't. The rentiers have shown time and time again they would rather destroy the economy than allow everyone to have the luxury of stability.
The top 19% do not trust government because for the last 40 years government has been hijacked and made to work against the people.
A perfect example: would you support a 30% hike to pay for Trumps border wall? If not, why are you against tax increases?
Many Republicans have taken this to the logical extreme: they say government programs CANNOT work. In solidly red areas, they justify this by pointing at how their local school districts or whatever are failing badly. Why are they failing? In large part due to lack of funding.
So, low funding creates failure which is used to justify lower funding. It's circular. In cases where there is clear evidence that a socialized alternative can work, like healthcare, the evidence is simply ignored.
This is not to say that the government cannot waste money. Of course it can: walls, military spending, and so on. But your argument is dangerously close to the hypothetical Republican one. The only solution I can see is for taxpayers to BOTH be willing to pay taxes AND demand value for their money.
Problem with money is that it represents economic activity. If the government spends more you need to work more (with borrowing becomes slightly more complex, working more now, or working even more in the future).
And when it comes to that, your logic would change as well. Would you work (under a bad boss, etc ... ie. work, as in actual work, whatever it takes) to improve those schools ?
For a very large majority the answer is no.
You say that the super rich have something most of us don't, stability. I agree with that. The super rich often want the rest of us to lack stability, it's good for employers to have desperate workers. However, at 300k, while you do not have absolute stability like the super rich, you have something that comes very close... the ability to plan ahead.
At 300k, you can save, buy top notch insurance and whether the storms that MANY people in the US cannot. Sure, there could be financial blows that are just too large to shrug off... but those blow that you can withstand, and those of a 30k'er, are two different beasts.
The rich can see the horizon and plan ahead.
The super powerful float in space looking down on earth and place things beyond the horizon.
Planning is good, but who's game are we playing?
The much better solution is to make a universal basic income the sole welfare system. Then let people make their choices.
you've gotta be one of the most of out touch people i've ever seen express their out of touch opinions. what shows of solidarity have you made? have you ever even been to the poor part of town? if you live in nyc message me and i'll gladly take you on a tour where you can stand with your brethren.
>With enough will and prudent planning you can make a dollar a day stretch much further than you could imagine.
go ahead: plan it out for me since my imagination is so poor.
Personal attacks like this are a bannable offense on HN. Please never post like this again. Instead, please (re)-read the following and follow them in letter and in spirit from now on:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
That means posting civilly and substantively, or not at all.
I'm not virtuous enough to push for higher taxes and more welfare? By shutting me down you'll have even more poor to celebrate! Isn't virtue signalling great?
A long time ago, pg (who created HN) wrote:
A comment in reply to another comment should be written in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something, not politicians trying to ridicule and misrepresent the other side.
That's the standard we ask users here to follow, regardless of how wrong or provocative the other comment has been.
Kettle meet pot.
Within a year or two? I think you mean "after your first paycheck". The ability to have a grand or two 'cushion' money in the bank is an incredible difference between the haves and have-nots. And I don't mean "money in my day-to-day account", I mean emergency money of any kind.
It's bizarre that a 300k/yr household can even contemplate being similar to a 30k/yr one.
So, if you lived as a $30k/year household you'd be able to save 3.5 years worth of expenses every year, ignoring any kind of tax efficient ways of doing so. In your first pay packet you'd have a spare seven and a half thousand dollars.
At a 3% withdrawal rate you'd want to have $860k in investments, meaning you could expect to work for ~8-9 years then retire forever. Less if you can invest in a more tax efficient way, are OK with just cutting down to part time or taking on a bit more risk. Oh, and if you're comparing yourself to a $30k household that can afford to save anything, all these numbers just go up and up.
So, comparing a $30k/year household who are able to save literally nothing, you could have the same life but only have to work for less than ten years rather than 40+.
Quick numbers, but I'd be surprised if the various simplifications change the overall result particularly drastically.
2 Beds 1 Bath -- 650 Jackson MO or 7800 a year or 25% of the income gross
$4940 - $5160 /mo 2 beds / 2 bath 979 sqft say 5000 a month or 60000 a year or 20% of the income
add the huge differences in effective tax rate of CA to MO combined with the jump in federal tax rates and it is arguable that 30k in MO would actually be better off
Groceries may be more expensive in the big city, but not 10x more expensive. You're not paying 10x more for a car, or a plane flight. And insurance premiums / deductibles sure aren't 10x cheaper in a less expensive part of the country.
Plus, the "$300K in expensive place" household has the option of moving to the less expensive place. The reverse is hardly true.
> it is arguable that 30k in MO would actually be better off
1. No. 2. Even if we were to accept that $30K in one place went just as far as $300K in another, "better off" ignores that higher property costs are likely to indicate a more desirable place to live. (For whatever reason: access to jobs, lower crime rates, pleasant to live in, what-have-you.)
Anyway, there's no such thing as perfectly impervious to risk - even ultra-wealthy families sometimes topple. That doesn't change the fact that with careful management, a $300k/year income can rapidly feather a rather nice, rather secure nest. $30k/year cannot.
And it costs quite a lot to get that level of care.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/business/economy/high-end...
If you talk to someone with significant health issues, it rapidly becomes, "The doctors don't have the answer".
Nobody wants to spend longer with the doctor - they want healthy, productive life outside the doctor's office.
That's not right.
How do you feel about kids born in Africa?
If it's the former: Suffering isn't a contest, just because you aren't the MOST impoverished person on the face of the planet does not make your problems less real, nor does it make you less deserving of help when you do need it.
If it's the latter, I'm all for getting those kids healthcare (and food) and whatever else they might need. That's a damn sight better use of my tax dollars than numerous Government programs currently sucking up actual trillions of dollars here in the States.
Considering that a lot of people are in that situation, I was wondering if you were advocating taking money from the rich to give it to the poor.
Personally, I don't believe in free healthcare. I accept that people who are unlucky or demonstrate poor judgement will suffer and die. However, I also believe that the market should be deregulated so that more affordable options become available.
Oof. That’s quite an admission.
I thank you for stating it though. I think our politics would be in a better place if people would admit things like this more.
I suspect that a lot of Republicans have the opinion that the poor don’t _deserve_ to be taken care of by society, because they believe that they are poor because of their own inaction. But it’s impossible to debate this - and change minds either way - because we don’t admit that point of view in discussion.
Can we please not generalize Africa? It's the biggest continent of the world, not a giant 3rd world country plagued by famine and poverty. Some countries are, but if you mean those, please name them specifically.
(I dislike phrases like "asians" and "europeans" too, much as Americans should dislike the moniker "American")
The problem isn't people not saving or investing the problem is an insane system kept afloat by greed, ignorance and fear. "Security"? what good is having paper when no one wants to buy it? October 29, 1929 is a day my grandmother remembers well and one I dread we will see again.
Government is the only insurance scheme large enough to protect us from ourselves.
Gambling on debt sounds like a sure-fire way to end up with even more debt. And that's what most investment boils down to: A gamble
Profit isn't generated out of thin air, somebody has to be the sucker and pay for it, those are usually the losers of aforementioned gambles.
Dating? Hell, you can't even get to know someone properly in 6+ months. Taking a job? It's all rainbows and unicorns unless you work there for a 6-12 months, etc.
You act as if investing is bad. You're never going to make any meaningful amount of money if you don't invest (in the broadest sense, this could be in yourself, in your business, in the stock market, in alternative assets, etc).
Debt magnifies the result of your investment. Whether you make a good or bad investment is ultimately up to you. Moderate debt isn't a real issue. The interest is often also tax deductible. It sure as hell makes more sense taking on debt for investing than it does taking on debt to (excessively) spend (as most Americans do).
Indeed, it's all about risk-management and in that regard gambling on debt represents a way higher risk, one I would not take, than gambling on savings you actually own.
With the latter, you at least have some control over the worst case scenario, while gambling on debt throws any control like that straight out of the window as debt can spiral out of control very quickly that way.
> The interest is often also tax deductible. It sure as hell makes more sense taking on debt for investing than it does taking on debt to (excessively) spend (as most Americans do).
Sure, it does make more sense but consumer credits are mostly short-term and as such somewhat more manageable for debtors with no real income security. Long-term investment credits, which usually have way better interest rates, are simply out of reach for many of these people because they lack the secure long-term income and/or can't make the required deposit.
Also, say you can acquire a plot of land you want to hold for a long time, and you can acquire it with 10% cash down + pay < 1% annual interest on a secured loan, you'd be an idiot not to take on the debt. Take the remaining cash and invest it somewhere with a higher yield.
It depends, is probably the correct answer here. :)
Disclaimer: this is not investment advice. Do not take investment advice from Internet comments.
Unless you're talking short term, put it in a total stock market index fund and forget about it.
Maybe the culture you come from is very new.
When there systems fall, only those with either high enough walls around them with ability to sustain independently within those walls, or at least the ability to escape to another currently stable situation will be secure.
When a Gotham'esque hell breaks loose, where is your security then?
This autonomy is the line.
It doesn't have to be total anarchy or civil war either. Imagine food shortages or media propaganda or government policy changes.
Again, all very fragile. The distinction is what controls you, and what autonomy you retain.
Categories: every day is a living fuck all, I depends on the systems around me, I have autonomy myself, I have autonomy over others as well.
Can you see the line?
One man’s apocalypse is another man’s civil war. I will let the more knowledgable reference history here.
On what we’re speaking about:
korrachs> I was wondering how long it would take for the attack on the solidarity of the precariat:
korrachs> The rich cannot be ruined. I can.
taneq> within a year or two you would have far more security than the $30k household will ever have.
Although you could argue that I’m cherry picking to make my point, I will so bold as to allude that perhaps we are missing the larger argument here.
The solidarity of the precariat under fire is an excellent way to consolidate power amongst the influential. A little something called divide and rule.
There's a strata of poor to somewhat rich, but they're all in the same bucket of the grander wealth scale: workers. They must keep doing work in order to maintain their lifestyle, the only thing their relative income difference dictates is the quality of that lifestyle and how long they can maintain it after losing income.
After that comes 'i don't need to work again' wealthy. Then 'fuck you' wealthy. Then 'I can ignore the law' wealthy. Then 'I can buy the law' wealthy. The 99% sits on the lowest rung on the meaningful wealth scale.
What is the difference between the first two? I can't figure it out.
As the creator of Minecraft put it:
>Once I realized I had fuck-you money and didn't care about my public image any more because it didn't affect my day to day life in any way
Lloyd Blankfein can.
> Beneath a veneer of classlessness, the American class reproduction machine operates with ruthless efficiency. In particular, the upper middle class is solidifying. This favored fifth at the top of the income distribution, with an average annual household income of $200,000, has been separating from the 80 percent below. Collectively, this top fifth has seen a $4 trillion-plus increase in pretax income since 1979, compared to just over $3 trillion for everyone else. Some of those gains went to the top 1 percent. But most went to the 19 percent just beneath them.
Nothing about what you state goes against the spirit of the article, which between the lines mainly seems to be about wealth redistribution.
Also, while I agree with all of your points, putting yourself in the same boat as the precariat, the most vulnerable underbelly of modern society, is a bit crass.
That's ridiculous. No government services costs that much. No insurance for any event costs that much.
If you live in richest country in the world and citizens pay 30% taxes and government can't provide free education and health care then it's something wrong with the government itself and artificially inflated prices on education and healthcare.
Instead of raising taxes, you need pop healthcare and education bubble first.
And it looks like it's not only me how doesn't like high taxes in Sweden:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/spotify-founders-blast-swedens-...
You and the $30k household are both in the global 1%. Over 80% of the world's population lives on less than $10/day. Both of you have social safety nets for food, housing, and healthcare. You live better lives than virtually everyone in the history of the planet has ever lived. That's what makes you the same.
>That is why I am a socialist and I know I'm not the only one.
Capitalism with relatively free trade is the only mechanism in the history of the world to be able to pull massive numbers of people out of grinding poverty. Socialism has tended to result in the opposite outcome. If you need a refresher course, watch Venezuela unfold right now in real time.
What does this even mean? Rome pulled massive numbers of people out of grinding poverty with the free grain dole, not at all capitalist.
>If you need a refresher course, watch Venezuela unfold right now in real time.
Yep, socialism is the cause of all their problems. In no way is this situation caused by the huge drop in oil prices, something almost entirely outside their control. And Capitalism has never experienced a collapse like theirs...
>What does this even mean?
It means that the reason there was grain for Rome to give was because of trade and capitalism (as well as some slavery and conquering which impoverish some populations to enrich others).
Capitalism (private ownership of means of production) means that I benefit if I provide things that other people want.
Trade allows individuals to make exchanges that benefit them.
Free trade ensures that exchanges benefit both parties, resulting in an increase of total well-being.
> Rome pulled massive numbers of people out of grinding poverty with the free grain dole, not at all capitalist.
And Rome periodically put them back into grinding poverty by reducing the size of the grain dole because it was too expensive? Funding consumption can't reduce long term poverty (give a fish vs teach to fish).
>as well as some slavery and conquering which impoverish some populations to enrich others).
Massive understatement, roughly 15% of the population of Rome were slaves and the Pax Romana is often seen as one of the causes of the breakdown of the economy. This is a common theme with capitalism and it's enrichment periods. It's very hard to argue that most of the world benefitted from colonialism.
>And Rome periodically put them back into grinding poverty by reducing the size of the grain dole because it was too expensive? Funding consumption can't reduce long term poverty (give a fish vs teach to fish).
And capitalism periodically put them back into grinding poverty with massive crashes or unchecked greed. Teaching a man to fish isn't that helpful if you then own all of the poles and materials to make the poles and refuse to share.
In a world with free markets and free trade how would this be possible? I'm having a hard time imagining a single person or even a corporation owning, for example, all of the iron across the entire globe.
And no, control of that land isn't what enabled the grain dole. The lands won by the army did.
This isn't that different than capitalist Venezuela. Loan someone in Venezuela a bunch of arms, they fight, then they have to repay you and look at those discovered oil fields they have!
(Also, you spotted that Rome was a slave society, but failed to make the obvious conclusion that slavery precludes free exchange of labour!)
Government took only 5%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_economy#GDP_and_income_d... In the Scheidel–Friesen economic model, the total annual income generated by the Empire is placed at nearly 20 billion HS, with about 5 percent extracted by central and local government.
Especially important in the sub-discussion about healthcare that's going on here. There's disparity of information (not every citizen has a complete knowledge of all possible medical specialisations), disparity of capability (medical conditions can be literally incapacitating), and disparity of risk (most medical conditions are mostly randomly distributed).
Yes, that's true. The world is not fair and we're not all equal in power. How is the solution to that to take 80% of everyone's income and hand over control of it to a select few in government?
In a free market system at least each participant is free to walk away from any given transaction. Now you want to take away even that.
Who do you think is better capable of making decisions about your own children's best interests when it comes to getting educated: you or Betsy DeVoss?
The more centralized power/money is, the more ripe it will be for corruptive forces. The less powerful the government, the less damage a bad actor can do when they inevitably get elected.
If this is the basis of your argument, then again there is only one logical endpoint. "What is property?... Property is theft!" Ownernship centralizes power over that thing in the hands of a person or small group.
The US libertarian view is anarchy with property rights stapled on, which does nothing except help the rich get more powerful. They use the same arguments about how freedom is essential and government interference is bad, but ignore how there is no freedom on private property and want government guaranteeing their status.
Nothing prevents you from moving in a more socialist country. Why don't you? There's plenty of choice out there.
Countries can control who moves into them, you know.
Many of our poor health outcomes seem to be due to lifestyle issues (obesity, drugs, lack of exercise, etc) not our actual health care system.
Not disagreeing with your comment as I think you are mostly right. Just thought you might find this interesting.
After all, if you always adjust your spending to your income, you will never be rich in any 'cannot be ruined' sense. Consequently, it would be unfair to compare situations to the 30k family and conclude you are in the same boat.
No, you wouldn't.
If you lived on 20% of your income ($60,000 - still double that $30k household that you claim is the same), you could retire in 5.5 working years and have that nest egg sustain you forever - no welfare state needed.
If you drop it down to the $30,000, saving 90% of your income, you could retire in 3 years.
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim...
Your lifestyle is preventing you from doing that, and your lifestyle and the fact that you can choose whether or not to live the $30k lifestyle is how you are not the same as that $30k household on the other end of town.
> That is why I am a socialist and I know I'm not the only one.
You're still only a socialist as long as you're spending other people's money.
The question is not one of abstractions, but of political realities. What exactly has this so-called "solidarity of the precariat" wrought? The author's point is precisely that the upper-middle class actively work against the interests of the 80%. Do you disagree that 30k/yr private schools, Ivy League legacies, and these suburban enclaves are also "an attack on the solidarity of the precariat"? Only that the 80% only have their words and their votes, whereas the 20% have real political power?
It sounds like you should buy insurance.
What's stopping you from saving up same amount of money?
> if I was to get an incurable disease I would slide down the income scale without a break.
...as would your utility to the society. It's understandable, from basic moral instinct, that society would continue to provide you with basic food and shelter, would such a thing happen. But why on Earth would I, for example, be compelled to continue pay you your former salary (since we're on HN, I'd assume you're on senior software engineer level) after you can no longer provide the relevant service?
The fact that it would put him at a significant relative quality of life disadvantage compared to his peers. A widespread 80% tax would not.
This is also true of insurance systems.
Nobody's pretending that socialised systems magic healthcare out of thin air, it's more a question of total resources spent by society and distribution of outcomes - including whether certain people get rationed out of the system because they can't afford it.
Transportation
Post
Healthcare
Emergency Services
Basic Welfare
For everything else there's capitalism.
Although I've never had the option to choose these utilities in the cities I've lived in. I haven't lived in a ton of cities, but enough to wonder.
I live in the UK where we have a national health service paid for by direct taxation. If I get ill I will be taken care of, by a government provided service, at no cost to me. If I don't get ill then I'll end up with a bit less money, but all the people around me who do get ill will be cared for free of any direct charge whether they're rich or poor. I literally cannot understand how you can think that's worse than any alternative for healthcare provision.
I don't understand your assertion. Why would anyone do that, and what would they call public healthcare instead? Even social-democracy has socialism as one of its components.
We're going to have to wait until the baby boomers die off to have any reasonable chance of getting a proper safety net in place.
Why do you think high taxes and "safety nets" are the way to go? Why can't we just be free? How many times must collectivism be exposed for the fraud that it is before we stop re-visiting that waste of time?
And that's just the actual jobs, with automation eating more jobs ever faster, fewer workers are now producing more than ever meaning there are fewer salaries doled out and even less money making it away from the wealthy.
Communism did fail, but I think it arrived too early. I really think there's some merit to the idea that once the machines have eaten all the jobs, and once we're free to our own time, that there's no reason to keep up the illusion that we must remain employed for seemingly little reason other than "that's the way it's always been done."
Then how do you define socialism, if it is not government-provided public services?
It's also worth noting that Marx included things like national infrastructure in his definition of "means of production", and I haven't noticed that many privately owned roads in the USA... Maybe you're not quite as far from socialism as you'd like to believe.
The waiting lines in the UK for surgeries make it more likely you die before you get it in time if you have anything remotely serious. Yeah, socialist health care works really, really well.
It's cognitive dissonance. They have not experienced a quality public health care first hand, so they cannot admit that it works without contradicting their core economical beliefs.
It's not cognitive dissonance (unless on the part of public-health-is-better folks). Its a different metric. If cost is the only measure, then sure, 3 week wait for a free aspirin is 'good'. If its timeliness, then other systems win hands down.
NHS triage is pretty effective: stuff that might actually kill you gets seen to immediately. Chronic conditions get managed long-term. The vast majority of the long waits are for things like hip operations, which will improve quality of life but aren't particularly urgent.
The US system is not without waits: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/sunday-review/long-waits-...
The latter.
In this case, the system which can get urgent attendance to all users wins over the one which does it only for a subset, even in terms of timeliness.
A system than turns non-urgent care (a cold or the flu) into urgent care (pneumonia) is going to 'stuff the ballot box' in its favor however.
- a) one where you would be randomly assigned to one of two groups: one which gets timely attendance for urgent and non-urgent needs; and the other one which gets no attendance at all, of any kind.
- b) one where all users get attended with an equal 3 weeks delay for non-urgent needs, and 0 delay for urgent needs.
> if you have something not risky you have wait-times for exams of 1-3 weeks
In Canada that's closer to 3-6 months.
> if you have ANYTHING risky there is no wait time, you get your exams and surgeries asap the same day if needed
In Canada, average wait times in emergency rooms are 20+ hours.
Also, in the UK, you won't die waiting. Someone else who doesn't have a serious illness will just have to wait a little longer. They do understand how to triage you know. In fact, they probably do it better since people get treating according to need rather than what kind of insurance they have.
2. Good insurance is extremely expensive. If your premiums for good insurance are low, that just means your employer is paying a lot. I don't see much substantive difference between paying high premiums and paying high taxes.
Our healthcare/insurance system is miles better than nothing, but that's no reason to stick our heads in the sand and insist that it's especially good by modern standards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
At best, it has a speculative quote or two.
This crucial point of yours seems to have been missed by the author of the article. I wonder if that has something to do with them being from the UK, which has nationalized healthcare and some sort of a welfare state.
Oh and by the way, countries like the Soviet Union have never been known for providing good healthcare solutions or even producing remotely interesting new drugs for their population.
Are you sure you really want socialism for health care? Seems like the facts don't really align with your idealized version of socialism.
When everybody in this thread are advocating for socialism, are using the word in the European sense, socialism as in social-democracy [1], as have many leading European parties in their names [2][3]. Its tenets are as many as there are people using the word, but usually involve a strong safety net with a publicly owned healthcare system, strong redistribution by taxing the rich and companies, and generally having corporations on short leash. For a successful implementation, see the Nordic countries.
In the US, the word socialism is used as a synonym for communism, that is the word that would be used in Europe for the kind of government that ran all those countries you mentioned, is responsible of all those awful things and shares nothing with socialism but a far historical background, lost in the mists of the late XIX century.
In real life (in Europe), it would be hard to find anybody that goes by socialist or votes a socialist party that would advocate for anything remotely similar to a full fledged Communism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Democratic_Party_of_Ger... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Party_(France)
I can see that lots of Americans refuse to acknowledge the difference between different kinds of political systems, or look at Europe as it actually is. It's disappointing that even on HN people can't see past their prejudices.
I can't figure out "Europe as it actually is." I have concluded that peasants like to be ruled and cradle to grave socialism is what people clearly prefer despite the negative effects it has on real personal freedom.
The world is full of countries with more equally distributed healthcare systems than the US with better public/private balance. The one that gets brought up most often here is the UK NHS, but there are plenty of others.
(Ironically, even if you limit yourself to actual communism, Cuba has quite an effective healthcare system. It just relies on not having freedom of movement so doctors can't move to better paid countries)
"The infant mortality rate in Cuba is lower than it is in the United States and is among the lowest in the world"
Not perfect, but far better than you might expect.
How many countries with socialist health care systems then produce new drugs for patients? I can tell you, it's about none. Most of the new drugs worldwide come from the US market. There's no way going around that fact.
Novo -- focusing on diabetes; about 15,000 employees in Denmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novo_Nordisk
Novozymes -- enzymes; about 6,500 employees in Denmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novozymes
Coloplast -- colostomy bags etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloplast
Genmab -- cancer etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genmab
These are 4 directly medical companies that also are all 4 part of the OMX 20 stock market index (similar to NASDAQ 100, the most 20 valuable public companies). That index also has 2 hearing aid companies (GN and William Demant)
One source estimates 44.000 employees in biotech/medtech in the Copenhagen/Sweden "Medicon Valley" area.
There's also the question of what kind of research is prioritised by the profit motive.
(Human Genome Project is probably the flagship example of such international public research)
>The rhetoric of “We are the 99 percent” has in fact been dangerously self-serving, allowing people with healthy six-figure incomes to convince themselves that they are somehow in the same economic boat as ordinary Americans, and that it is just the so-called super rich who are to blame for inequality.
7 months after the election is actually quite long.
Here is what makes me in a $300k a year household and the $30k household on the other end of town the same:
>Your home is regarded as a model home, your life as a model life. But all this splendor, and you along with it... it's just as though it were built upon a shifting quagmire. A moment may come, a word can be spoken, and both you and all this splendor will collapse.
The rich cannot be ruined. I can. If I was to be fired from my job it would be a minor disaster, if I was to get an incurable disease I would slide down the income scale without a break.
I would happily pay 80% taxes if I knew that when I needed it most the welfare state would have my back, but I know that it won't. The rentiers have shown time and time again they would rather destroy the economy than allow everyone to have the luxury of stability.
That is why I am a socialist and I know I'm not the only one.