Great so insurers can go back to dropping/denying people.
Why does Trump want US citizens to die because they cannot get health care?
Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]
831–840 of 1001 posts
Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]
#832So he's going to lower taxes on the wealthy, drop taxes on businesses, increase spending on military, destroy our national parks to extract oil, and lay off federal employees. This is going to help the middle class and the uneducated who are struggling through... magic. None of the lobbying stuff will ever see the light of day. The term limits won't happen. He's going to repeal the "illegal" Obama executive orders bu…
> A middle-class family will get a 35% tax cut. I did some back-of-the-envelope calculation to figure how our taxes could change for various income levels for married joint filers. This does not factor in any deductions. Nobody is getting a 35% tax cut. Tax rate for middle-class families will go down by around 1% only, and taxes will go up for low-income families by 2%. Single tax filers will also see an increase in…
Virtually nobody making 10 million a year pays a 39% tax rate. They likely take most of their comp as stock and pay the long term capital gains rate. If they're in finance/VC, they are taking full advantage of carried interest. They have financial planners who structure their portfolio to favor low-tax investments. They form S-Corps and trust funds to defer tax liability, get paid in distributions, write off all sorts of business expenses, use real estate to offset gains with depreciation, carry forward every conceivable loss, tax loss harvest etc. etc. etc. This is how Warren Buffett, Mitt Romney and Trump end up paying The people hit hardest by "tax the wealthy" politicians are folks making large salaries (engineers, doctors, lawyers...). The mega-wealthy like Mark Zuckerberg make $1 a year in salary. If you really want to go after the wealthy, you need to tax wealth, not ordinary income and go after the complexity of the tax code.
Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]
#833Earlier quoted context omitted.
The climate change one scares me the most as well. We should be focused on renewable energy more than anything right now. It's a much bigger threat than terrorism. And building a wall and kicking out immigrants is so backwards. We need to be more united as humans and work together, not put up more barriers.
What's wrong with making people come through a door in a wall? You realize some people have homes with walls around them and they actually prefer visitors to ring the doorbell and wait for you to let them in. It's the exact same principle. If you lose sight of this very simple concept then you need to go back and see where you overcomplicated it. You don't see people like Richard Feynman going "oh this quantum mechan…
How will a wall stop illegal immigration? Couldn't traffickers just use ladders to climb the wall?
Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]
#834Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not unlike how an opposing party will criticize a bill based on its number of typed pages. The thump of a couple of inches of paper on a podium makes for great and reductive theater. It's likewise naïve to consider the number of regulations to be a direct barometer of the goodness or badness of regulation in general. Next we'll see the refactoring of existing regulations into smaller or larger components to a…
Reducing the number, length and complexity of regulation is a valid goal, and that hasn't changed in thousands of years: "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government." - Tacitus
The actual Tacitus quote doesn't really serve your argument. It's "The more corrupt the government, the more numerous the laws." -- you've got it backwards.
Complexity is one thing (although it should be obvious that complex domains often require complex descriptions). But number is arbitrary.
Suppose there exists a set of three distinct regulations regarding ways to safely manufacture a drug, and a dangerous new process is invented for which there is wide consensus that a new regulation is required. Which two of those first three should be discarded? Must every new regulation be weighed in arbitrary relative value against every other possible combination of two regulations in that subject matter area? That department? The country? By reductio ad absurdum, the cut-two-to-add-one rule means that the ultimately correct number of regulations is one. And if it's not one, then there must be some higher "correct" number of regulations at which point the subtraction rule would no longer apply.
Your argument seems to be "whatever that number is, surely it's lower than what we have now". How is that number decided and by whom? Subject matter experts? Voters weighing ballot options written by government officials? Does the number somehow fall or rise to make room for new needs judged important enough? If so, by whom? Is one complex regulation better than ten simple ones? Are ten simple ones more "corrupt" than one complex one?
Unfortunately there's no obvious way to apply a tree-shaking algorithm to the full body of regulations, other than to have humans look at a rule and all agree that the "blue dress on Sundays during harvest" rule can be scrapped. And Chesterton's fence makes many of those judgments risky. So now we're back at politics.
Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]
#835> FOURTH, a five-year ban on White House and Congressional officials becoming lobbyists after they leave government service. > FIFTH, a lifetime ban on White House officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government. > SIXTH, a complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for American elections. Can't see a reason to complain about any of these (though I've posted objections in other threads about other measures,…
Even though Republicans have House and Senate majority, I still don't see any of this getting through. Those politicians won't self-destruct their careers.
Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]
#836Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How is that considered feasible by any rational person? It's something that sounds simple and good to someone who not only isn't aware of the details of what it would mean in practice, but also isn't aware of their own inability to understand the details and nuance, or that there are details and nuance. It was a Dunning-Kruger election.
I'm going to introduce a new concept here, the "Dunning-Kruger effect effect": people who talk about the Dunning-Kruger effect usually haven't read or did not understand the Dunning Kruger effect paper and are only putting their ignorance on display [0]. Furthermore they are also ignorant of follow up studies proving that even the original effect was just a statistical artifact [1]. The Dunning-Kruger effect effect i…
So... meta.
Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]
#837A lot of what's in there seems pretty reasonable, but: 1) The whole border wall thing is just ridiculous. I thought he had given up on that. Why would Mexico have to pay for that? If the US wants to build a wall, fine, build it and pay for it. It doesn't make sense to demand that Mexico pay for it. It's like building a wall on your property and demanding your neighbors pay for it. 2) The FDA thing is scary. Regulatio…
on the FDA side, this is enlightening:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3538397/
"Each drug is estimated to cost $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion in cash outlays per approved biopharmaceutical"
This particular problem means that lots of very promising cancer drugs never see the light of day.
For example for Neuroblastoma there is an approved drug called dinutuximab https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-drug.... This is the only approved drug for treating pediatric cancers that was approved in the last 10-20 year.
Meantime significantly more potent (and possibly effective) drugs are in clinical trials, eg: Hu-3F8 at MSKCC. But... given the cost and enormous amount of red tape needed to get the drug approved (combined with very small market) odds of them getting approved in the next 10 years are not that high.
Something needs to change, but I am not sure exactly what.
Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]
#838A lot of what's in there seems pretty reasonable, but: 1) The whole border wall thing is just ridiculous. I thought he had given up on that. Why would Mexico have to pay for that? If the US wants to build a wall, fine, build it and pay for it. It doesn't make sense to demand that Mexico pay for it. It's like building a wall on your property and demanding your neighbors pay for it. 2) The FDA thing is scary. Regulatio…
>> I thought he had given up on that.
You did?? He's been personally promising to build it 3-5 times a day to tens of thousands of people in every competitive state in the US. It's kind of hard to miss...
>> Why would Mexico have to pay for that? ... It's like building a wall on your property and demanding your neighbors pay for it.
Except the neighbors -- to stretch the analogy a bit more -- have their children, pets and a few spare vehicles in your yard and have become accustomed to browbeating you into not complaining about it. Trump et al. plan on altering this dynamic.
Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]
#839Earlier quoted context omitted.
But "aim for simplicity" is a good enough rule by itself, which isn't further enhanced by some "2 for 1" heuristic. On top of that, "regulation count" is not a natural category, since one regulation can specify an arbitrary number of things. If you replace A) No smoking and B) no littering with C) No smoking or littering, have you changed anything substantive? You have not. Regulation complexity, of course, is a natu…
The difference is that you operate in a cooperative environment(well, most of the time) within your team. The president operates in an antagonistic environment by default - even if Congress is controlled by the same party, the two sides of government(executive/legislative) are supposed to keep each other in balance. I otherwise agree that the measure is too simple.
Yes and more specifically Washington DC, the home of the regulators, voted 92% for Hillary. So Trump needs very hard rules that aren't open to interpretation AT ALL to have any chance of them actually working.
Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]
#840So he's going to lower taxes on the wealthy, drop taxes on businesses, increase spending on military, destroy our national parks to extract oil, and lay off federal employees. This is going to help the middle class and the uneducated who are struggling through... magic. None of the lobbying stuff will ever see the light of day. The term limits won't happen. He's going to repeal the "illegal" Obama executive orders bu…
>A middle-class family with two children will get a 35% tax cut. He's basically Oprah with tax cuts. Kidding aside, I think all politicians promise wide tax cuts, and this "contract" was written prior to him winning. So take most with a grain of salt.
It certainly doesnt seem like a dem. tradition