Just the Sin City Saint THINKING OUT LOUD!
by 2020, the annual cost of medical care for seniors who fall is expected to reach $54.9 billion. Paul touted the “nobility of private charity” that’s the kind of philosophy that results in us spending about twice as much per person on health care as any other country on earth.
It is economic incentive that drives enterprise, not the supposed nobility of spirit of the wealthy. That idea is aristocracy. Our nation is founded on the self-evident truth that aristocracy is a lie, and that powerful elites do not share their money, power, and privilege with the people. We now have a new aristocracy, created by transferring literally trillions of dollars in wealth to the wealthiest people in our society
an example of how wealthy donors have been empowered by the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in the landmark Citizens United case, which paved the way for super PACs. Unlike candidates, super PACs can accept unlimited amounts of money from individuals and corporations to support a candidate so long as they do not officially “coordinate” with the campaign.
“wholesale funding.” is industry parlance for borrowing in the markets, Lenders take the cheap, short-term money and lend it for higher rates to companies and individuals. in 2008 investors who lent in that short-term market fled, leaving the financial firms that borrowed there without funding. It was a Wall Street version of an old-fashioned bank run
The problem in defining the middle class with an income or wealth ranking is its ambiguity. if we define the middle class as families between the 25th and 75th percentiles, how different are families at the 24th than those at the 25th or the 76th from those at the 75th percentiles? How different are those at the 25th than those at the 75th?
The study, conducted by William R. Emmons and Bryan J. Noeth, found that one reason many Americans viewed themselves as struggling was that their real incomes had not advanced significantly beyond their parents’ even when they reached higher educational levels, while those who matched their parents’ achievements were actually worse off.The typical American family makes slightly less than a typical family did 15 years ago.
“If you owe $1 million, I’m going to knock on your door,” he told the paper. “If you just owe $700,000, we’ll hope you get a job sometime so we can levy.”
Wage garnishment is normally the IRS’ most effective tool for securing repayment, but that tactic is useless against most of the people who are skating away with government money at this point. Most of them are wealthy enough not to work a steady job, so there are no checks to garnish.
[Q]: A third Texas president, L.B.J., created Medicare in the mid-’60s. Your hero Ronald Reagan campaigned vigorously against that, saying it would lead to socialized medicine, would end liberty in the United States. Who was right: L.B.J. or Reagan?
[Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz]: It’s not worth tilting at windmills. I don’t know. I wasn’t alive then.
Who was right? Who’s to say? That was in the before-times. I have no opinions on the before-times.
Rand Paul spent the first day of his official candidacy testily explaining to reporters that nothing he said before about 2009, when he began running for office, is in any way relevant to his presidential run now and so it’s all off limits. In one case, he even claimed that something he said in 2009 was said in 2007, pushing it back out of the acceptable-to-ask category, per his rules.
one of America’s most fundamental problems is that the alliance between the current form of Southern labor and the current form of New York finance is with us still. The Southernization of the Republican Party and the increasing domination of Wall Street’s over the nation’s economic life have combined to erode both the income and the power of U.S. workers. Unions are anathema to Wall Street and the GOP.