I'd like to respond to some of these, though I understand you were addressing goldfly.
Unsurprisingly, that doesn't disturb me—nor most people in this country (though obviously it does deeply disturb a sizeable minority). Nonetheless, this line of argument would be a lot easier to swallow from those intending to federally-defund Planned Parenthood if an alternative proposal were put forward to ensure all the non-abortion services which Planned Parenthood offers were still made readily-available to those who need and depend on them. Maybe that means entirely decoupling Planned Parenthood's other services from its abortion services, then removing funding from the latter but continuing to fund the former.Originally Posted by sturg33
Again—though I'm not a "fan" of abortion—those practices aren't problematic for me, on a political level; yet I understand they are to some. But to frame the funding of Planned Parenthood as simply about abortion rings pretty false to me, considering no alternative systems to convey its other services has even been suggested by the party seeking to defund it.
This is why I am in favor of implementing more than the mere less-than-half-way socialization of these sort of life-essential industries: because there will always a disjunction between "saving a life" and "how much is fair to charge" when profit is part of the equation.
Better revenue strategies would be palliative to your deficit concerns—and that needn't be only in the form of more progressive taxation practices. For instance, Matt Bruenig has some pretty good alternative ideas about that in the context of the UBI:
The idea of capturing the 30 percent of national income that flows passively to capital every year and handing it out to everyone in society in equal chunks has been around since at least Oskar Lange wrote about it in the early parts of the last century. This is, to me, the best way to do a UBI, both practically and ideologically. Don’t tax labor to give money out to UBI “loafers.” Instead, snag society’s capital income, which is already paid out to people without regard to whether they work, and pay it out to everyone.
This might seem like a fantastical idea to some, but this is exactly how the Alaska Permanent Fund and the Permanent Fund Dividend works. Through the Permanent Fund, the state of Alaska owns a lot of capital assets. Those assets deliver annual capital income flows to the state, which are then parceled out in equal amounts to the citizens of Alaska through the Permanent Fund Dividend.
A national UBI would work very similarly. The US federal government would employ various strategies (mandatory share issuances, wealth taxes, counter-cyclical asset purchases, etc.) to build up a big wealth fund that owns capital assets. Those capital assets would deliver returns. And then the returns would be parceled out as a social dividend.
If you have a problem with this, but not the current arrangement where capital income is paid out in huge sums to small fractions of our society, then your issue is not really with passive income. It can’t be.Sacrifices are necessary sometimes. It's not that I "don't care about individual liberty", but instead that I am willing to trade what I consider a relatively minor aspect of it (the freedom to not guarantee the "labor of highly specialized and skilled people (doctors)") for improvement of the health and life-expectancy outcomes of our society. Indeed, in my worldview, it's immoral and illiberal not to ensure the health and medical/psychological well-being of a society's populace.
Nothing wrong with sucking a bit of some dick, if that's your fancy.
Plenty of folks on the left, myself included, have been (and continue to be) very critical of President Obama for that. But President Obama's habeas corpus and war-mongering sins don't make President Trump any less of an authoritarian threat (and, actually, by better enabling, make him more of one).
The Russia thing—even if one assumes it to be one-hundred-percent legitimate (and I, for one, think it's very overblown)—is a ninety-nine-percent distraction.
For better or worse, it already seems like the Democrats are going to be more willing to work with or capitulate to President Trump than the Republicans were to President Obama—but we shall see.
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