Just live your life and be happy, vote when you can but don't let what you don't control make you sad.
These things don't matter until they really, really, really do. Having seen the grass on both sides of the fence, I can attest that it really can be meaningfully greener.
We just let them do it because we (collective we) have grown so used to having it we can't remember what it was like before, people dying from treatable conditions because they couldn't afford it, average life expectancy been a whole decade lower (or more) etc.
We (again collective) won't realise what we had until it's gone.
That's public money going to the private sector for no real benefit.
Like Obamas presidency. For every good he's done or tried to do, all the shit in the world that affects the US (and even things that are not real apparently) gets pinned on him, regardless of cause.
And sure, Obamacare probably has a lot of faults, but is that because of its concept, because of congressional gridlock, or compromises?
I won't argue either way, but it's always sad when something gets dismantled or at least scolded for reasons outside of its grasp.
I don't know enough about NHS to say, but spending £600M/year on management consultants doesn't sound like a healthcare problem.
I'm not religious, but it's the same with Islam being lumped together with extremists, Christianity being lumped in with crusades and westboro baptists and other lunatics, and both republicans and liberals being categorized by a few vocal idiots.
Sometimes you have to try to look objectively at something and the faults alongside it, and try to determine if they are one and the same. Sometimes it's worth fighting to improve something instead of just burning it to the ground, because there's a good chance the new foundation being built is worse than what you destroyed.
In the US, as I say, this would not have been covered by my insurance, and would have cost around $50,000 to fix. Completely infeasible for me to find that amount of money. The NHS did an excellent job of fixing it for free.
I wonder how is that possible? Insurance plans these days have to cover you even if you have a pre-existing condition, even the cheapest plans cover everything after a deductible, unless I am missing something
I don't think the Republicans have enough people in the Senate to block filibusters. So I assume the Democrats will use the filibuster to block repeals of the healthcare law.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/upshot/the-future-of-obama...
Boom. Now Obamacare can be repealed with simple majority. I bet you dollars to donuts that insurance prices, however, will not go back down to pre-Obamacare prices. Because profits.
Sounds simplistic but if you look at the system as a whole, ask who its benefitting the most, doesnt seem to be the electorate.
We have the same problem in the UK, it got us Brexit and you folks Trump.
As Michael Moore said when he predicted a trump win, "It's the biggest fuck you they can send".
Average rent ranges from $500-$3600/mth though for illustrative purposes (taking into account people in expensive places share) let's use $1K/mth for our hypothetical person. [3]
That leaves you with $16K/yr (male) and $7K/yr (female) for food, transportation and incidental expenses.
Obamacare backed health plans have a maximum out-of-pocket of $7K/yr for individuals.
Yeah, I'd say the median American is pretty much SOL if they get sick even if they have insurance. And those figures don't take into account the price of the insurance itself if your employer elects not to provide it to you.
In the UK your NHS annual out-of-pocket maximum is $0.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
[2] https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator
[3] http://mentalfloss.com/article/81296/average-cost-one-bedroo...
[4] https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/out-of-pocket-maximum-li...
US median individual wage is $39K/yr for males and $26.5K/yr for females [1]. That amounts to an after-total-tax (for a California resident) of $28K/yr for males and $19K/yr for females.
The tax calculator you reference includes estimates of sales, property, and fuel taxes (which make up much of the tax total at the incomes here), which are actually rolled into rent, transportation, and general purchases, so you are double counting some expenses.
At least the standard employment sponsored plans.
I thought my first (awful) plan had a benefit limit, as in you're getting a maximum of $1.25M from us, regardless of what happens.
My family has easily hit the pre-Obamacare lifetime coverage limits and fairly frequently would've hit the annual ones. Our $4k out-of-pocket cap saves us from 10-50k in coinsurance/copays depending on the year. As a result, they'd drop us in a heartbeat if they could.
Soon, it looks like they'll be able to.
Based on what? You are just speculating now
This is a huge deal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC - aka "Companies are people and money is free speech"
As for money being free speech, the equivalence is that in general it costs money to publicize views. The FEC has limits on what you can do with the money (you're not supposed to buy jewelry or fancy vacations) and where it can come from.
I hope, as an European, Trump will be pro NATO enough to keep Putin from invading more countries...
Let's hope that Trump will look at who buys US stuff and who doesn't. And Russia is too badly managed to have a good economy and be a good partner for trade.
Nothing positive about Clinton implied, either.
[0] The Swedish ex communists have declared themselves a feminist party -- but stamp it as "racist" when immigrant women have problems with oppression in the immigrant areas... :-) They are courting the intolerant immigrant votes. I would dare anyone to find any more hypocritical political example anywhere, but... sadly, there certainly are.
So the left has been pushing 'back-door' laws that would do the same thing, effectively: huge taxes on ammo, letting manufactures be legally liable crimes committed with their sold weapons, etc.
Regardless of your views on guns, it is the 2nd Amendment - if the left wants to change it, there is a method to change the Constitution. Executive decisions and other nefarious schemas shouldn't be accepted.
I am talking about civil liberties in general. The mechanism for gay marriage would be similar.
As a footnote, yes, I have read the decision and I have read my constitution. Furthermore I don't think this is the right place for those kinds of ad-hominem attacks.
Not giving Federal taxpayer money to PP doesn't stop them from doing abortions (they officially claim they use no taxpayer funds for abortion anyway), and you can't ban abortion via statute due to Roe v Wade having supremacy. (BTW, PP does a minority of abortions in the USA.)
Even if the USSC wanted to replace Roe v Wade, they can't just do that by decree. A relevant case that would give them that nexus would have to navigate itself all the way up the chain from Federal court through the corresponding Court of Appeals (assuming they even hear the case), winning all the way in courts laden with Obama appointees, to even get on the USSC's radar.
You didn't understand what you claim to have read.
But even if it DID pass the House, the Senate would just filibuster it.
And even if by some miracle one was passed and signed, it would hit an immediate injunction from the Federal court of the abortion-backers' choice, using Roe as a precedent.
The concept makes for a good scare tactic to raise contributions and volunteers, but it goes nowhere in the real world.
Why do you believe this? On a night when the traditional polling and data mechanisms we have come to rely on have proven totally fallible, I have a hard time trusting ANY proposed split.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_in_the_United_State...
If Clinton won, the republicans would probably have held one or both houses, which seems like significant checks on power even if she could have a more friendly supreme court than Obama.
Certainly I doubt our founders thought an entire political party would control every single branch of government. But even if it does the only things that can be accomplished need to be agreed upon by that large group of people. If the will of the people is to elect a group of people into those positions that all hold the same philosophy and values, then that's just democracy. It's what we voted for. I don't know if any party has controlled all three branches of government at once, but it's not like that negates the principle of checks and balances
I think we are closer to uncharted territory than a lot of people assume.
Political parties are just another application which happens to run well on top of the same OS.
By what specific mechanism could a Trump presidency cause them to lose access to birth control or abortion?
The trend in the House and Senate and many state governments since 2008 is far more concerning to me than Trump's election.
Trump also doesn't seem to have much of a view at all, during campaign he expressed one thing and its opposite multiple times, he craves attention and acceptance and if the GOP does that (and lets him enact the petty revenges he's know for) I don't expect he'll have any issue enacting evangelical policies. Hell, he explicitly stated he'd leave the presidential busywork to his VP.
Did you forget that the Democrats controlled the House and Senate until 2011? In fact, the Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate until February of 2010.
See Currier:
- http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/currier-v-jackson...
- https://www.statnews.com/2016/07/01/mississippi-abortion-cli...
Also see Whole Woman's Health:
- http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/whole-womans-heal...
- http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/us/supreme-court-texas-abo...
Live somewhere like CA? Hard to see the state government or Supreme Court rolling things back too terribly. Health insurance if you don't have a good job would be a big question mark, would be nice to see the state pick that up.
Live in a state where the legislature is inclined to pass laws against your sexuality, religion, etc? That's a much more vulnerable position.
IMO a much larger problem than Trump is the structural favoritism in the American political system towards less-populated areas. This has a lot to do with how Obama's last term was largely sabotaged as well, after all.
Clinton's projected by the NY Times to win the popular vote by 1.2% right now. That's hardly a huge mandate for a singular agenda. It's a margin that would still be at massive risk if people continued ignoring those non-coastal populations feeling economically left behind.
Instead, despite that 1.2% lead for the Democratic presidential candidate, that party will be the minority party in every branch of government? That's a better, fairer system?
Structurally separating everyone into groups drifting further and further apart for everyone is a recipe for a system that can't get much useful stuff done.
(And the media ate up the Trump campaign despite it being incredibly unappealing to those small coastal bands. Nobody build an unassailable media monopoly by ignoring something like 48% of the population.)
You can't be sure that if, instead, the popular vote were used that she would have taken a different platform that was soundly rejected by most states but secured her a much larger popular vote margin.
So much for any of their projections. The actual popular vote difference is 202,340 -- less than 0.17% of votes cast.
Thomas Jefferson
I mean, unless you're incredibly wealthy, and don't care about anyone else at all.
And with the ability to set a Justice and a party dominated House and Senate, it does not look very good for "checks and balances" over the next 4 years.
And that of course assumes you're not subject to deportation for whatever reason. If Trump keeps any of his campaign promises we will be seeing many people forced out of the country. No idea what the extent of that will be, and at least some people here are first generation and claim to be anchors.