101–110 of 114 posts
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It's one route to privatization. Cut funding, manage poorly until nobody believes the state can do the job, then sell to your allies.
It's one route to nationalization. Increase regulation, make impossible to manage until nobody believes the company can do the job, then add it to your political platform.
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"Most of the state will be part of the ocean within fifty years, but don't worry people, we've slashed services so the budget's balanced and your taxes won't go up." Sometimes you need to spend money to protect against a future where the costs are even higher. The mosquito control initiative could have paid for itself with the sales taxes on that $5.5B in revenue that never happened.
Agreed, but sometimes there is no money to spend, and that's my point...it is purely a budget issue not a political one. When your State budget goes from say $70B down to $60B (including a stimulus package from the federal government) and the state is already $200B in debt where does the money come from? Had the republican (turned independent, turned democrat) governor Crist known saving $5.5M would cost $5.5B he wou…
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My question was what is the total cost of Florida's mental hospitals and if that is worth it. Assuming that $100M cut was a 10% cut it means that the total expenditure could be $1B. Which looks ridiculously high for merely 20M population of Florida. Of course there is a whole point of whether government ought to spend some money now to avoid spending on basic services later whether there are proper studies done and i…
Florida's GDP is $748B. Suppose 1 in 300 people in the state are mentally ill enough at a given time to warrant living in a mental hospital. If that costs $1B, about half as much of the economy would be spent on them (per capita), compared to the general population. Seems very reasonable to me, without any more specific numbers to go on. To throw out another number for comparison, medicare and medicaid together cost…
Your math only works if mentally ill people receive no other services from the state whatsoever. Assuming the mental hospitals receive supplies by road, this is not true.
What do mental health services do anyways? Just give kids meth in a pill for not paying attention to boring school topics? You can be locked up, drugged, shocked, lobotomized. No rights to an attorney, not even a one phone call. I really believe the whole psychiatric industry is a fraud. Leon Eisenberg admitted ADHD being fake when he died.
As someone who is an inconsolable bipolar wreck without therapy and medications, go fuck yourself. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about on this topic.
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Florida's GDP is $748B. Suppose 1 in 300 people in the state are mentally ill enough at a given time to warrant living in a mental hospital. If that costs $1B, about half as much of the economy would be spent on them (per capita), compared to the general population. Seems very reasonable to me, without any more specific numbers to go on. To throw out another number for comparison, medicare and medicaid together cost…
> about half as much of the economy would be spent on them (per capita), compared to the general population Your math only works if mentally ill people receive no other services from the state whatsoever. Assuming the mental hospitals receive supplies by road, this is not true.
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Florida's GDP is $748B. Suppose 1 in 300 people in the state are mentally ill enough at a given time to warrant living in a mental hospital. If that costs $1B, about half as much of the economy would be spent on them (per capita), compared to the general population. Seems very reasonable to me, without any more specific numbers to go on. To throw out another number for comparison, medicare and medicaid together cost…
Assuming your numbers government spends $15k for every 1 of those 300 people. That number seems pretty high. The Tampa Bay investigation's violence refers to violence in the hospitals itself and not the general violence in society. For 13.5K per year you might reduce the hospital staff by 10% but that is unlikely to result into chaos that the report seems to suggest.
By the way, for comparison, Medicare spends $10k/year per beneficiary in Florida.
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Perhaps. Or perhaps you are choosing to interpret my words in a way that leads to a silly result. The much more obvious reading starts with noting that the party ruling Florida is the same party that also happens to have policy positions that are of a piece at the local, state and national level positions.
Is that the party that invaded Libya? I get confused, on account of the two "big" ones seem identical to me.
- If you're playing that game where overstating things for political effect because you [...], have fun, but I don't want to play.
- If you actually believe that, either your priorities are so very far removed from mine that we have nothing to say to each other, or you have blinded yourself to a huge array of very real differences with very real effects on very real people. In which case, find someone else to argue with; I prefer to debate politics with people who live in the real world.
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I 100% agree with your point in priciple. The problem is reality. Government leaders use this principle to overspend on non-productive causes and create debt problems. So end of the day I'd prefer to have a government balancing the budget and leaving some opportunity on the table, rather than the likeyhood debt spent on non-productive causes will become an anchor to future development.
Dealing with the inevitable future where flooding isn't just frequent but perpetual sounds like a pretty good expenditure of money. Either that or start working deals with other states to deal with the inevitable exodus of people and the complete implosion of the tax base.
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Where do you get that money? I bet you could shake $100M out of the prison system if you looked for cases of people being locked up for ridiculously trivial offenses. Given how prisoners often cost $40-60K per year, wouldn't take that many. I don't expect people to be psychic, but common sense must apply here. When you "save money" by slashing budgets on road repairs, and ten years later your roads are so awful you h…
Florida has somewhat of a...reputation...for the caliber of its criminals.
The worst is those who are otherwise good citizens but got busted for simple possession and are doing years of time. That costs the state hundreds of thousands of dollars, and after they're branded a felon, they'll probably "re-offend" given they have limited job opportunities.
If you wanted to design a system to generate prisoners they're doing a great job, which given the for-profit prison system, is probably the idea.
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Dealing with the inevitable future where flooding isn't just frequent but perpetual sounds like a pretty good expenditure of money. Either that or start working deals with other states to deal with the inevitable exodus of people and the complete implosion of the tax base.
This is brought up a lot, is there much evidence in the past of exoduses of people due to tax rises ?
Remember, a lot of these states that are suffering from tax revenue problems have some of the lowest tax rates in the country. Where are people going to flee to? The 49th lowest tax state instead of the 48th?