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Comment by MuffinFlavored | Hacker News Reader

What do Republicans advertise they are going to spend money on? I'm only familiar with Democrats calling for free health care, free college, universal basic income, etc.

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War and enriching military contractors, creating the TSA, subsidies to businesses that don't need them, etc. https://i.ytimg.com/vi/FiW5I95R5xg/hqdefault.jpg

Say what you want about him, but Trump did run an anti-war and anti-military spending campaign. The budgets he's approved are a huge betrayal to his base. There's spending on border security and the wall that's not really happening, but that's chump change compared to entitlements and broader military spending.

So it seems like we have the choice of voting for left-wing politicians who run on increasing spending on new forms of entitlements, and spending will increase precipitously - or voting for right-wing politicians who run on not spending like the neocons do, then just do it anyway, and spending will increase precipitously.

https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/06/politics/donald-trump-defense... "Donald Trump on Wednesday called for eliminating the sequester on defense spending and increasing military spending to boost troop levels and the number of ships and aircraft."

The Senate is largely tilted towards rural areas, and hence Republicans. This provides a pretty natural check on the spending ambitions of Democratic presidents, except in rare circumstances. No such check exists for Republican presidents, which is why our deficits are soaring despite the current record economic expansion. Take that into account when you vote.

The rural Republican base are just the pawns used to build a voting block that can win elections. The party doesn't actually serve them. That's why it makes so many appeals to them on election cycles and then always turns around and only favors policies that benefit wealthy business owners.

Border security, policing, military spending

https://www.ft.com/content/9ce05a54-c424-11e9-a8e9-296ca6651...

advertise ≠ action. take a look at the general slope by party: https://www.axios.com/federal-budget-deficit-trump-obama-f11...

free military

The military and homeland security.

Also: A half reasonable single-payer health care system should save a lot of money over-all. The fiscal conservatives should be all over that one.

Our government already spends more on its healthcare programs (Medicare and Medicaid) than Germany and UK, and they don’t even cover half of the people. I don’t see how paying for everyone would save any money at all. It might make the per capita costs a bit lower, but total tax expenditure will certainly be higher.

We can't go to a program like the UK that's works out to be cheaper in the long run because our current half-assed program costs more? Not following the logic here. We already "pay" for the people we don't explicitly pay for. (Emergency room, lack of preventive care, etc)

The world abounds with concrete examples of systems that provide healthcare at a cost that would allow us to cover all our citizens at less than we're paying now, over all.

E.g., https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...

(BTW, when talking about the overall cost, it doesn't make sense not to count the costs of employer-provided plans.)

The real question is how to we transition from the broken, hodgepodge system we have now to one of those proven better, and cheaper systems.

Right, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it is possible to have such system here. World also abounds with countries building cheap rail, but when we attempt this, it's very expensive. Just because it can be done, doesn't mean that it will end up happening the way you wish it to happen.

I think it would be worthwhile to have a pilot program of it here, say with a single small state introducing it. It could show us how it would end up working in practice.

The problem with a single small state is that providers will leave when you cut their pay.

The thing to do is to encourage many more people to do primary care.

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