I have a toothache, so I went to the dentist today on an emergency, and for $85 she gave me a referral to somebody who actually does the root canal for $570 and then somebody else who does the crown for more than that. Plus, I have to wait for another ten days to go in for the appointment.
I need not ask if something is wrong with this medical system. Everyone agrees that there is something wrong with this, except for the wealthiest people for whom $570 is barely more than a 20th of a Mitt Romney impulse wager. Of course, given the US political divisions now, Repubs will say the costs and long waits are because the government won't get out of the way of the medical industry so it can be more efficient and less wasteful, even if no other country does it that way and every last industrialized country has a better, cheaper medical system than ours, and they don't have nearly the blind faith in the magic of the free market.
Otherwise, we hear, and many believe it's because those damn patients complain frivolously to the courts, when studies show that more than 100,000 patients die of preventable accidents in hospitals every year. That doesn't indicate complaints about our medical system are usually frivolous.
The dearth of affordable dental care in this country is appalling. Even when I had company paid insurance, by a first-rate corporation, it covered dental pitifully. But dental has been known to be expensive and poorly insured for years. Add to that the pain involved, and many people in the purported premier nation of the industrialized world are going about with medieval teeth.
No functional society would run a medical system like this. No healthy society would even debate doing medicine as a free enterprise endeavor. I think Ayn Rand, Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley and the Cold War ruined this country and made it insane.
I know I've been terrible about this blog for a writer. Other things
just take precedent right now, such writing fiction. That's my highest
priority. Like helping other writers, particularly in my writing group.
I'm trying to post in here more often, especially since, ultimately, I want to sell my writing and, therefore, I have to be known.
I'm impaired by my sleep being so fragged up. For years I've tried, but I can't seem to predict with any accuracy when I'll be ready to fall asleep, or really, when I'll wake up. Back when I had a "real" job I would force my body to wake up. However, I wasn't awake. I would make incredible errors and my mood would be uncontrolled, from concussions, I think. Now at least I can write whenever it suits me during the day. I just have to make sure I do it and not surf the Internet for hours.
On Wednesday, January 18th, I gave a speech at the local artists guild. The first time I've done any public speaking "in two decades" is what I said. Actually, that time was in front of a classroom. It was probably the first time I did any public speaking since the 80s, and that time I bombed. This time, I didn't. I killed them.
The talk was on plotting and outlining in fiction, and specifically, I presented Randy Ingermanson's "snowflake method" as a possible solution. I spent a week preparing for it, and it paid off. I put some humor into it. For the most part, the humor worked, but I shouldn't go on the club circuit yet. It was a good audience, who wanted to learn.
Other members of the panel did their part and were as well prepared. We were all surprised and pleased about the workshop overall. I thought it would be less coherent, less successful than it was, because it didn't seem like we were very coordinated in our prep, but the prep worked for me and my three cohorts. It went very smoothly, and members of the audience told us they were never bored.
A woman came up to me afterward and said she felt she had been inspired to write. Another woman, part of our writers' group, said she went right home and wrote. I am so gratified that we did such a good job.
However, I sacrificed a full week of work writing and preparing this speech. I don't know how I could have done this if I had a real job. Truth is, I
couldn't have. I work so damn slow. It has always been a problem. I don't know if it's from years of depression, concussion or side-effects from medication, I'm generally too slow for any employer to tolerate now. Not to mention the fact that I work nervously making sure I'm not fucking something up.
No, I'm doing the job I should be doing. The one I'm perfect for, and I can't do much else.
Friday, January 27, 2012
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
How government deficits favor the wealthy.
Government deficits favoring the wealthy is not a topic I've heard brought up in any political forum.
If you have buttloads of money you can't possibly use but don't want to lose, how would you rather support government? With taxes or with loans?
And who has the most wherewithal to buy bonds at auction? The rich the middle class or the poor?
The wealthy of course, making a loan is far better than being taxed. The wealthy can collect a cut on their mature bonds, of course, and have then always have the option to sell the debt to recoup their principal.
Therefore, deficits turn the government into an investment for the wealthy. Now ask yourself how does the government pay on these loans? This has an easy answer: the greatest proportion comes from the taxes paid by the lower and middle classes.
Capitalism has its own force of gravity: money attracts money. (Money also has its own law of entropy, but that's a different topic.) Like physical gravity, it's something you don't notice until massive amounts of currency are involved. The key behind this gravity is compound interest.
Nobody yet has seen that it's in the interest of the wealthy to have government deficits. And though I can't prove this, my guess is that's the real reason why we have runaway government debt for decades. Meanwhile, lacking the reserves of cash to make significant loans, the lower and middle classes have an interest in supporting government through taxes. (No pun intended). Taxes favor the lower and middle classes, loans favor the wealthy. If the lower and middle classes would catch on to this, the Tea Party idiots wouldn't be clamoring for lighter taxes and "not punishing" the wealthy. By not "punishing" the rich, they reward the rich. It guarantees the rich will get richer, and definitely, they will get richer at the expense of everyone else.
However, there is a limit to how much a government can loan, and these loans only work for the wealthy if the government doesn't default. That's why you're hearing all these calls for austerity because default is becoming a danger. My guess is, propaganda and deliberate mis-education are behind those calls.
Austerity is nothing but the wealthy demanding they be paid no matter what. It never works for fixing the economy as the wealthy promises it will. Heinrich Bruning, Chancellor of Germany in 1930-32, forced through an austerity program. Bruning, a trained economist, and not a bad man. He and his Center Party stood against Hitler, but his austerity program discredited both. He became known as "the Hunger Chancellor." We all know how well that ended. Austerity is socially destabilizing.
However, then as now, austerity was considered a sound program, because more than half of economics is influenced by the interests of the wealthy.
My sense is that governments have become another investment bubble. Remember when housing was "safe?" These days, when word gets around that any investment is a safe bet, that's when you have to worry. They'll milk it until it's no longer safe, then they'll milk its blood until it's dead. That's what happened to the housing market.
The US government is a two-generation-old bubble. Now Europe's a bubble, too. So are most governments of the world.
So, don't fool yourself about class harmony. Class division is really what's behind the fiscal failure in our state and federal governments, and people need to see it and need to understand how harmful loans at compound interest can be, generally, and how they are particularly set to undermine government. Debt is the leading cause of slavery in the world now. What happens when whole governments are made into slaves?
You either have to default, or tax the rich to cover the debts that they own.
If you have buttloads of money you can't possibly use but don't want to lose, how would you rather support government? With taxes or with loans?
And who has the most wherewithal to buy bonds at auction? The rich the middle class or the poor?
The wealthy of course, making a loan is far better than being taxed. The wealthy can collect a cut on their mature bonds, of course, and have then always have the option to sell the debt to recoup their principal.
Therefore, deficits turn the government into an investment for the wealthy. Now ask yourself how does the government pay on these loans? This has an easy answer: the greatest proportion comes from the taxes paid by the lower and middle classes.
Capitalism has its own force of gravity: money attracts money. (Money also has its own law of entropy, but that's a different topic.) Like physical gravity, it's something you don't notice until massive amounts of currency are involved. The key behind this gravity is compound interest.
Nobody yet has seen that it's in the interest of the wealthy to have government deficits. And though I can't prove this, my guess is that's the real reason why we have runaway government debt for decades. Meanwhile, lacking the reserves of cash to make significant loans, the lower and middle classes have an interest in supporting government through taxes. (No pun intended). Taxes favor the lower and middle classes, loans favor the wealthy. If the lower and middle classes would catch on to this, the Tea Party idiots wouldn't be clamoring for lighter taxes and "not punishing" the wealthy. By not "punishing" the rich, they reward the rich. It guarantees the rich will get richer, and definitely, they will get richer at the expense of everyone else.
However, there is a limit to how much a government can loan, and these loans only work for the wealthy if the government doesn't default. That's why you're hearing all these calls for austerity because default is becoming a danger. My guess is, propaganda and deliberate mis-education are behind those calls.
Austerity is nothing but the wealthy demanding they be paid no matter what. It never works for fixing the economy as the wealthy promises it will. Heinrich Bruning, Chancellor of Germany in 1930-32, forced through an austerity program. Bruning, a trained economist, and not a bad man. He and his Center Party stood against Hitler, but his austerity program discredited both. He became known as "the Hunger Chancellor." We all know how well that ended. Austerity is socially destabilizing.
However, then as now, austerity was considered a sound program, because more than half of economics is influenced by the interests of the wealthy.
My sense is that governments have become another investment bubble. Remember when housing was "safe?" These days, when word gets around that any investment is a safe bet, that's when you have to worry. They'll milk it until it's no longer safe, then they'll milk its blood until it's dead. That's what happened to the housing market.
The US government is a two-generation-old bubble. Now Europe's a bubble, too. So are most governments of the world.
So, don't fool yourself about class harmony. Class division is really what's behind the fiscal failure in our state and federal governments, and people need to see it and need to understand how harmful loans at compound interest can be, generally, and how they are particularly set to undermine government. Debt is the leading cause of slavery in the world now. What happens when whole governments are made into slaves?
You either have to default, or tax the rich to cover the debts that they own.
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