I’m not a socialist. So please erase that presumption from your mind before arguing against a point I don’t defend. I understand that capitalism is a big reason why the United States of America is the wealthiest nation on the planet. Full-blown socialism isn’t good for everybody—but neither is full-blown capitalism.
Because of capitalism, the ebb and flow of the stock markets generally favors investing (in the long run, informed investors stand a better chance of making money instead of losing it). Corporate profits rise every year. This doesn’t favor anybody making less than $10 an hour; people living paycheck to paycheck who don’t have enough disposable income to invest in a 401(k) or buy stocks. Since 2009, the last year the federal government raised the minimum wage (to $7.25/hr), the unemployment rate has dropped from around 8% to under 4% today; the Dow Jones Industrial Average has more than doubled, from approximately 9,170 to 21,750 (this is being written December 26, 2018); the Nasdaq has nearly tripled from approximately 2,100 to 6,139. So businesses are raking in record profits, and although they are hiring more people, they aren’t paying them much more than they were ten years ago.
According to a University of California-Berkley study, “From 2009 to 2012, average real income per family grew modestly by 6.0%... However, the gains were very uneven. Top 1% incomes grew by 31.4% while bottom 99% incomes grew only by 0.4% from 2009 to 2012. Hence, the top 1% captured 95% of the income gains in the first three years of the recovery.” So the only people benefiting from these huge market gains are the one-percenters and those in the upper-middle class who have enough money leftover after paying all their bills to put at least 5-10% of their income into a 401(k) (or similar). And even then, somebody making a lifetime average of $75,000 per year could spend 50 years in the workforce and in their entire lifetime wouldn’t make a fraction of what their company’s CEO makes in a bonus in one year. That’s what capitalism gets you, folks.
Businesses thrive on capitalism because capitalism is savagely selfish. When a company sells its shares to the public its board of directors bears the onus of promising profits to those shareholders. So businesses make decisions that are intended to benefit its shareholders—that is their top priority. That’s how capitalistic businesses are designed. They don’t necessarily care that much how those decisions affect the environment, their customers, their competitors, or their employees. Of course, some businesses try harder than others, but most public companies driven by good old-fashioned American capitalism have their shareholders as their first priority. Often times, the company’s mission statement, which is easily found on every large business’s website, states this openly in plain English. That’s what makes the prices of your stock go up—those companies are actively trying their best to make that happen. That also explains why wages don’t always keep up with the rate of inflation or the annual rise of healthcare costs. That’s why the environment suffers and the wage gap between “the haves” and “the have-nots” grows. Capitalistic businesses need to make their shareholders happy at the cost of paying high wages and taking care of the environment.
I believe the vast majority on the right wing don’t realize this, or they know it but simply don’t care. They don’t understand how lucky one has to be to be rich. You not only have to be lucky enough to be born with the right mix of genes that makes you intelligent, healthy, able-bodied, able-minded, hard-working, assertive, and driven, but you have to avoid marrying a spouse who bankrupts you with awful decisions, poor health, or expensive child custody battles, divorce, and legal fees; you have to avoid having children who cost you expensive hospital or legal bills; you have to be lucky enough to have parents or a support system that encourages you and enables you to attend school or find a high-paying job; you have to fortunate to avoid an accident that costs you money and time away from work, or that completely rules out certain high-paying professions altogether (surgeons can’t operate with amputated hands after an injury, for example).
It takes a lot of luck to be rich. Not every smart kid can grow up and go to Harvard. How many of our most intelligent children and would-be rocket scientists, attorneys, and CEOs have never attended university because they were orphaned at a young age, suffered brain damage in a car accident, had parents who discouraged school or didn’t know how to properly encourage it, or grew up in a culture that emphasized other aspirations (perhaps dealing drugs as a negative example, or athletics as a more positive one)? It takes a lot more than just plain old “hard work” to be rich too. Read your social media comments or the comments from conservatives left on news websites (FoxNews comments are a great example). The comment section is ripe with Republicans urging poor people to “get off your ass and work” as if that’s all it takes. Try hard. It really makes me wonder: If trying hard is all it takes to be rich, why aren’t all the people who spout off such vitriolic hatred of underprivileged Americans rich? There are approximately 11 million millionaires living in the United States. I don’t think the “try harder” folks on social media are all among them, so why aren’t they trying hard, like they preach to everybody else? They don’t seem to notice the millions of people who work full-time and still live in poverty.
The non-partisan research group, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, states “Among SNAP households with at least one working-age, non-disabled adult, more than half work while receiving SNAP — and because many workers turn to SNAP when they are between jobs, more than 80 percent work in the year before or after receiving SNAP. The rates are even higher for families with children. (About two-thirds of SNAP recipients are not expected to work, primarily because they are children, elderly, or disabled.)” So it seems there are definitely more factors than just “getting off your ass and working” and “trying harder.” Once again, one has to be lucky enough to possess the intelligence, ambition, physical capacity, health, and support system necessary to achieve a high-paying job and avoid receiving welfare.
The other factor Republicans and political conservatives can’t seem to grasp is that it isn’t possible that every intelligent, ambitious, and able-bodied person get an education, learn a trade, or work a higher paying job. A CBSNews article stated that McDonalds, for example, employed 420,000 people in 2014. Allow me to estimate that approximately 100,000 of them were adults age 18 and over who are not currently in school or training for a better job and earning a wage close to the minimum, thus living in poverty with little hope to improve their lives. These are the people for whom political conservatives have very little empathy. Only a tiny fraction of them are intelligent enough to earn a useful degree, and many are likely hampered by extenuating circumstances, such as being a single parent, having to care for a sick relative, or being too poor to even pay the application fee at a college or technical school. But even if every single one of them, all 100,000, decided all at once to go to truck driving school, learn how to weld, or become an electrician’s apprentice, the US economy only has a limited number of those jobs available… and we’d still need people to flip our burgers! Who is going to do that if they all left? We need people to deliver our pizzas, drive our taxis, and bag our groceries. The adults who reluctantly do those jobs aren’t lazy pieces of shit—they are victims of a capitalistic economy that has no space for them at the top of the economic ladder. There are a very limited number of seats available up there.
Those Americans don’t deserve to suffer in poverty because our society has no room for them in a higher tax bracket. But I agree with the popular Conservative rallying cry that socialism may encourage people to be overly content. And, for obvious reasons, doctors deserve to have a much higher income than janitors. For the reasons above, I favor a modified economy that looks like this:
There is no other moral solution to healthcare besides universal healthcare to all citizens. Every other idea is literally immoral, because it guarantees that Americans with illnesses and maladies go untreated and millions of people suffer in debt because of hospital bills or high insurance premiums and/or deductibles. How any American could be against this totally baffles me. How could one self-identify as a "patriot" while having absolutely no empathy for fellow Americans suffering senselessly?
Universal healthcare for all citizens benefits everybody. It benefits those without insurance or with very expensive insurance, obviously. It benefits whatever Middle Class we have left because they no longer have to keep their adult children on their insurance plans into their 20s. It benefits wealthy business owners because it gives them a healthier and happier workforce. Even if you're one of those pathetic Republicans who think poor people are "lazy" and that they don't "deserve" to have nice things (like a healthy life), their children are completely innocent, and denying them good health because of their parents' mistakes is atrocious. Why should only the wealthiest Americans have access to America's best doctors? Some insurance plans don't cover certain procedures or even allow access to doctors--poor American people can only see nurse practitioners. And many of the clinics that accept government sponsored healthcare have awful bedside manner. That would change if every person had equal access to all doctors and hospitals.
The United States is the wealthiest country in the world--no doubt we could pay for it. According to a 2016 Forbes article, 36% of US expenses are on the military. The United States could cut the military budget by a quarter and still spend about as much as China, Russia, Saudia Arabia, India, and France (the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th highest military budgets in the world) combined! So, there's a quick and easy way to recover $152 billion. If every mid-sized company paid the exact same amount they spend on health insurance for their employees as they spend now as a tax to fund healthcare for all, and large companies spent 5-15% more; plus if every American earning about $75,000 spent exactly what they spend now on insurance to fund healthcare for all, and the top 1% of earners paid a whole lot more, then we can easily fund this.
But there lies another hidden problem: The current healthcare system is extremely capitalistic. Hospitals are owned by for-profit conglomerates and pharmaceutical companies, too, sell shares to the public. These are businesses, and capitalistic businesses, if you'll remember, often times do not have the best interest of their employees and customers (their patients) in mind when making decisions, because they are obliged to their shareholders to pay dividends and earn profits.
How sickening it is that we live in a country that allows people to get wealthy because of fellow American people getting sick? It's rather deplorable, and I'm betting there are a good chunk of conservatives who can acknowledge this--because they've probably been victimized by it in their lifetime.
If you've ever used "Big Pharma" as a pejorative to voice your distrust of drug companies... If you've ever tried holistic medicine or homeopathy because doctors are expensive... If you've ever subscribed to the conspiracy that hospitals and doctors keep cures to certain diseases under wraps because they need sick people in order to earn profits... Well, then you're most likely experiencing a malfunction in your skeptical force field, but you would also no doubt agree with me that capitalism has failed the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. Socialism can fix it.
Don't even dare make your lame attempt to discredit socialism because it failed in Venezuela or because the Nazis were a "Socialist party." The Nazis were a far right wing regime, and they were socialist in name only--they had absolutely nothing in common with modern day Bernie-Sanders-type-of-socialists. Venezuela does not have and never has had universal healthcare or education, and their minimum wage is around $10 per month. Since oil is the biggest export by far in Venezuela, and they became too dependent on it, and in 2003 they experienced a labor strike at their state-owned oil company, and in 2014 another collapse in the global price of oil further devastated Venezuela's economy. Their issues have nothing to do with providing healthcare to their citizens, so they don't compare to what I'm talking about either. The type of socialistic healthcare I'm describing in this blog more closely resembles Sweden, Canada, or Denmark. Those three countries, ranked by a study from The Lancet, are 8th, 14th, and 17th in the world in quality of healthcare. The United States, a country with more money than all of them by leaps and bounds, is 29th.
I'm not asking for an entirely socialistic economy. I like capitalism. I just think that, like a responsible Honor Roll high schooler, it needs mostly autonomy mixed with a bit of close oversight. And I believe that capitalism is the worst and most immoral idea ever when it comes to healthcare and medicine. The United States of America has the means to improve the livelihood of every one of its citizens and so there's no excuse to not do it. Ignoring the well being of tens of millions of American people is about the most un-American thing I can imagine doing.
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Because of capitalism, the ebb and flow of the stock markets generally favors investing (in the long run, informed investors stand a better chance of making money instead of losing it). Corporate profits rise every year. This doesn’t favor anybody making less than $10 an hour; people living paycheck to paycheck who don’t have enough disposable income to invest in a 401(k) or buy stocks. Since 2009, the last year the federal government raised the minimum wage (to $7.25/hr), the unemployment rate has dropped from around 8% to under 4% today; the Dow Jones Industrial Average has more than doubled, from approximately 9,170 to 21,750 (this is being written December 26, 2018); the Nasdaq has nearly tripled from approximately 2,100 to 6,139. So businesses are raking in record profits, and although they are hiring more people, they aren’t paying them much more than they were ten years ago.
According to a University of California-Berkley study, “From 2009 to 2012, average real income per family grew modestly by 6.0%... However, the gains were very uneven. Top 1% incomes grew by 31.4% while bottom 99% incomes grew only by 0.4% from 2009 to 2012. Hence, the top 1% captured 95% of the income gains in the first three years of the recovery.” So the only people benefiting from these huge market gains are the one-percenters and those in the upper-middle class who have enough money leftover after paying all their bills to put at least 5-10% of their income into a 401(k) (or similar). And even then, somebody making a lifetime average of $75,000 per year could spend 50 years in the workforce and in their entire lifetime wouldn’t make a fraction of what their company’s CEO makes in a bonus in one year. That’s what capitalism gets you, folks.
Businesses thrive on capitalism because capitalism is savagely selfish. When a company sells its shares to the public its board of directors bears the onus of promising profits to those shareholders. So businesses make decisions that are intended to benefit its shareholders—that is their top priority. That’s how capitalistic businesses are designed. They don’t necessarily care that much how those decisions affect the environment, their customers, their competitors, or their employees. Of course, some businesses try harder than others, but most public companies driven by good old-fashioned American capitalism have their shareholders as their first priority. Often times, the company’s mission statement, which is easily found on every large business’s website, states this openly in plain English. That’s what makes the prices of your stock go up—those companies are actively trying their best to make that happen. That also explains why wages don’t always keep up with the rate of inflation or the annual rise of healthcare costs. That’s why the environment suffers and the wage gap between “the haves” and “the have-nots” grows. Capitalistic businesses need to make their shareholders happy at the cost of paying high wages and taking care of the environment.
I believe the vast majority on the right wing don’t realize this, or they know it but simply don’t care. They don’t understand how lucky one has to be to be rich. You not only have to be lucky enough to be born with the right mix of genes that makes you intelligent, healthy, able-bodied, able-minded, hard-working, assertive, and driven, but you have to avoid marrying a spouse who bankrupts you with awful decisions, poor health, or expensive child custody battles, divorce, and legal fees; you have to avoid having children who cost you expensive hospital or legal bills; you have to be lucky enough to have parents or a support system that encourages you and enables you to attend school or find a high-paying job; you have to fortunate to avoid an accident that costs you money and time away from work, or that completely rules out certain high-paying professions altogether (surgeons can’t operate with amputated hands after an injury, for example).
It takes a lot of luck to be rich. Not every smart kid can grow up and go to Harvard. How many of our most intelligent children and would-be rocket scientists, attorneys, and CEOs have never attended university because they were orphaned at a young age, suffered brain damage in a car accident, had parents who discouraged school or didn’t know how to properly encourage it, or grew up in a culture that emphasized other aspirations (perhaps dealing drugs as a negative example, or athletics as a more positive one)? It takes a lot more than just plain old “hard work” to be rich too. Read your social media comments or the comments from conservatives left on news websites (FoxNews comments are a great example). The comment section is ripe with Republicans urging poor people to “get off your ass and work” as if that’s all it takes. Try hard. It really makes me wonder: If trying hard is all it takes to be rich, why aren’t all the people who spout off such vitriolic hatred of underprivileged Americans rich? There are approximately 11 million millionaires living in the United States. I don’t think the “try harder” folks on social media are all among them, so why aren’t they trying hard, like they preach to everybody else? They don’t seem to notice the millions of people who work full-time and still live in poverty.
The non-partisan research group, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, states “Among SNAP households with at least one working-age, non-disabled adult, more than half work while receiving SNAP — and because many workers turn to SNAP when they are between jobs, more than 80 percent work in the year before or after receiving SNAP. The rates are even higher for families with children. (About two-thirds of SNAP recipients are not expected to work, primarily because they are children, elderly, or disabled.)” So it seems there are definitely more factors than just “getting off your ass and working” and “trying harder.” Once again, one has to be lucky enough to possess the intelligence, ambition, physical capacity, health, and support system necessary to achieve a high-paying job and avoid receiving welfare.
The other factor Republicans and political conservatives can’t seem to grasp is that it isn’t possible that every intelligent, ambitious, and able-bodied person get an education, learn a trade, or work a higher paying job. A CBSNews article stated that McDonalds, for example, employed 420,000 people in 2014. Allow me to estimate that approximately 100,000 of them were adults age 18 and over who are not currently in school or training for a better job and earning a wage close to the minimum, thus living in poverty with little hope to improve their lives. These are the people for whom political conservatives have very little empathy. Only a tiny fraction of them are intelligent enough to earn a useful degree, and many are likely hampered by extenuating circumstances, such as being a single parent, having to care for a sick relative, or being too poor to even pay the application fee at a college or technical school. But even if every single one of them, all 100,000, decided all at once to go to truck driving school, learn how to weld, or become an electrician’s apprentice, the US economy only has a limited number of those jobs available… and we’d still need people to flip our burgers! Who is going to do that if they all left? We need people to deliver our pizzas, drive our taxis, and bag our groceries. The adults who reluctantly do those jobs aren’t lazy pieces of shit—they are victims of a capitalistic economy that has no space for them at the top of the economic ladder. There are a very limited number of seats available up there.
Those Americans don’t deserve to suffer in poverty because our society has no room for them in a higher tax bracket. But I agree with the popular Conservative rallying cry that socialism may encourage people to be overly content. And, for obvious reasons, doctors deserve to have a much higher income than janitors. For the reasons above, I favor a modified economy that looks like this:
- Capitalism with strict regulations and government oversight. In a completely free and open market, businesses make very selfish decisions. America needs our corporations to be free to make big profits, so long as their decisions don’t significantly impact the environment or the safety of their employees/customers. Businesses ought to be expected to behave in an ethical manner, maintain fair hiring practices, and provide products and services that benefit the American people, and the way to maintain that level of fairness is regulations and oversight.
- Higher minimum wages. There is no city in the country where a minimum wage affords somebody to live independent of anybody else. A CEO who uses his or her annual 8-figure bonus to put a down payment on a luxury yacht while their lowest paid employees require government assistance just to pay rent and put food on the table should not exist in the wealthiest nation on the planet. I’ve heard many suggestions that I like and believe could work. Perhaps there could be a law that the highest paid worker in a company can earn a maximum of 50 or 100 times the salary of that same company’s lowest paid worker. For comparison, Forbes reported that “In the 1950s, a typical CEO made 20 times the salary of his or her average worker. Last year, CEO pay at an S&P 500 Index firm soared to an average of 361 times more than the average rank-and-file worker.” Again, this reinforces the University of California-Berkley study that almost all of the profits and economic gains that capitalism is responsible for are going to the top 1% of America’s workforce. Another idea I’ve heard touted is that no American company which has even one single worker taking government welfare could be eligible for tax breaks at any level. If a company’s employees are taking handouts because the company isn’t paying them enough money to survive, then the company can’t get handouts for itself.
- We need full-blown socialized healthcare for every American citizen. I can’t compromise on this one. If you’ve read this far, you’ve noticed I’ve cited poor health as a reason people are in poverty or go into debt. So many of these problems can be alleviated if nobody had to worry about how to pay medical bills. Think of the abundance of problems Medicare for all would solve: Nobody would have to worry about losing their health insurance if they lost their job for any reason; Nobody would have to go into debt to pay for live saving medication; Nobody would be forced to make a difficult decision between a lifetime of debt and a surgery one can technically live without, but is needed (such as hip replacement); Wealthy people could retire younger, opening up more and more jobs for others to obtain; Thousands of undiagnosed mental illnesses could be treated because people could afford to see a psychiatrist and the demand for mental health professionals would increase drastically; And families could use the money saved on paying for insurance and doctor visits to pay for college or reinvest in the economy, perhaps buying property or a new car.
There is no other moral solution to healthcare besides universal healthcare to all citizens. Every other idea is literally immoral, because it guarantees that Americans with illnesses and maladies go untreated and millions of people suffer in debt because of hospital bills or high insurance premiums and/or deductibles. How any American could be against this totally baffles me. How could one self-identify as a "patriot" while having absolutely no empathy for fellow Americans suffering senselessly?
Universal healthcare for all citizens benefits everybody. It benefits those without insurance or with very expensive insurance, obviously. It benefits whatever Middle Class we have left because they no longer have to keep their adult children on their insurance plans into their 20s. It benefits wealthy business owners because it gives them a healthier and happier workforce. Even if you're one of those pathetic Republicans who think poor people are "lazy" and that they don't "deserve" to have nice things (like a healthy life), their children are completely innocent, and denying them good health because of their parents' mistakes is atrocious. Why should only the wealthiest Americans have access to America's best doctors? Some insurance plans don't cover certain procedures or even allow access to doctors--poor American people can only see nurse practitioners. And many of the clinics that accept government sponsored healthcare have awful bedside manner. That would change if every person had equal access to all doctors and hospitals.
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| Source: Forbes.com (2016) |
The United States is the wealthiest country in the world--no doubt we could pay for it. According to a 2016 Forbes article, 36% of US expenses are on the military. The United States could cut the military budget by a quarter and still spend about as much as China, Russia, Saudia Arabia, India, and France (the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th highest military budgets in the world) combined! So, there's a quick and easy way to recover $152 billion. If every mid-sized company paid the exact same amount they spend on health insurance for their employees as they spend now as a tax to fund healthcare for all, and large companies spent 5-15% more; plus if every American earning about $75,000 spent exactly what they spend now on insurance to fund healthcare for all, and the top 1% of earners paid a whole lot more, then we can easily fund this.
But there lies another hidden problem: The current healthcare system is extremely capitalistic. Hospitals are owned by for-profit conglomerates and pharmaceutical companies, too, sell shares to the public. These are businesses, and capitalistic businesses, if you'll remember, often times do not have the best interest of their employees and customers (their patients) in mind when making decisions, because they are obliged to their shareholders to pay dividends and earn profits.
How sickening it is that we live in a country that allows people to get wealthy because of fellow American people getting sick? It's rather deplorable, and I'm betting there are a good chunk of conservatives who can acknowledge this--because they've probably been victimized by it in their lifetime.
If you've ever used "Big Pharma" as a pejorative to voice your distrust of drug companies... If you've ever tried holistic medicine or homeopathy because doctors are expensive... If you've ever subscribed to the conspiracy that hospitals and doctors keep cures to certain diseases under wraps because they need sick people in order to earn profits... Well, then you're most likely experiencing a malfunction in your skeptical force field, but you would also no doubt agree with me that capitalism has failed the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. Socialism can fix it.
Don't even dare make your lame attempt to discredit socialism because it failed in Venezuela or because the Nazis were a "Socialist party." The Nazis were a far right wing regime, and they were socialist in name only--they had absolutely nothing in common with modern day Bernie-Sanders-type-of-socialists. Venezuela does not have and never has had universal healthcare or education, and their minimum wage is around $10 per month. Since oil is the biggest export by far in Venezuela, and they became too dependent on it, and in 2003 they experienced a labor strike at their state-owned oil company, and in 2014 another collapse in the global price of oil further devastated Venezuela's economy. Their issues have nothing to do with providing healthcare to their citizens, so they don't compare to what I'm talking about either. The type of socialistic healthcare I'm describing in this blog more closely resembles Sweden, Canada, or Denmark. Those three countries, ranked by a study from The Lancet, are 8th, 14th, and 17th in the world in quality of healthcare. The United States, a country with more money than all of them by leaps and bounds, is 29th.
I'm not asking for an entirely socialistic economy. I like capitalism. I just think that, like a responsible Honor Roll high schooler, it needs mostly autonomy mixed with a bit of close oversight. And I believe that capitalism is the worst and most immoral idea ever when it comes to healthcare and medicine. The United States of America has the means to improve the livelihood of every one of its citizens and so there's no excuse to not do it. Ignoring the well being of tens of millions of American people is about the most un-American thing I can imagine doing.
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