What issues are REALLY a danger to Americans
Posted by John T. Reed on
I occasionally remind readers about what is important as opposed to all the spin and ratings seeking.
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• The national debt-to-GDP ratio is grotesquely high and once against rising at a trillion dollar a year of additional deficit spending rate.
• Trump’s trade war is hurting American exporters and consumers and likely to get worse.
• America is the nation that pharmaceutical companies develop new drugs for. All other nations impose price controls on drugs. Trump says the US government will now pay the same as foreign countries with price controls. Price controls cause supply to shrink to the point of disappearance. In an R&D field like pharmaceuticals, development of new drugs will stop because it will no longer be profitable. Prescription drugs department shelves will go empty. We have already had this with vaccines and it has caused shortages of vaccines. Venezuela’s empty store shelves are what you get when you impose price controls. The response to empty shelves may be nationalization of the pharmaceutical industry which would make the situation even worse.
• U.S. population is on the verge of shrinking and it is too old on average. Our average age is 38.1 according to the CIA FactBook. The world average is 30.4. A graph of the age groups should look like a pyramid. Ours looks like a silo. We must increase immigration by about a million families of five per year.
• U.S. medical care costs per capita are about double the rest of the developed world. But the solution is not to imitate them. They have single payer, pharmaceutical price controls, and waiting lists. We need to free marketize the portion of health care where that would work and private charityize the rest. This was the system we had before World War II price controls that exempted health care created the current, failing, employer-paid system. It is also the system we now have in the three U.S. medical care markets that are NOT overly expensive: dental care, veterinary care, and elective surgery like lasik.
• Education in the U.S. is in trouble. Inner-city union schools are horrible. All schools at all levels have been taken over by socialists teaching socialist ideology. Costs of post-high school education have been exploding far faster than inflation as have student debts. We need to end tenure, federally-guaranteed student loans, grantsmanship, trigger warnings, safe spaces, inability of conservatives to speak on publicly-owned colleges and universities, and denial of due process regarding accusations of sexual misbehavior against male students.
• The national defense is being weakened by funding cuts and by failure to change the hidebound U.S. military. The surface navy including the aircraft carriers are obsolete and have been since the 1950s. The military has more musicians than the State Department has employees. The show-off units cost too much and get too many people killed in the line of show-biz (about 20%) in the Blue Angels, Thunderbirds, and Golden Knights. Also, there are too many ceremonial units like the Old Guard and Marine guards at embassies and the White House. We have too many pilots and not enough pilotless aircraft. Our military is still oriented toward fighting World War II in Europe and not adjusting the using state-of the-art technology to dramatically reduce U.S. casualties and dollar costs of military operations.
• New nuclear nations North Korea and Iran need to be divested of their nuclear capabilities by whatever means necessary. If they are not and use those capabilities to successfully blackmail us, every malevolent nation will get them from North Korea.
• Many of the above problems stem from the fatal flaw of the Constitution of using representative democracy which puts politicians in charge and their incentives are to spend us into federal bankruptcy, to divide us into a 51%-49% groups, to make us angry and afraid of the other side to get out the vote, to assassinate the character of opponents because it works. Government by the politicians, of the politicians, and for the politicians must perish from the earth.
.
The issues being talked about on TV are generally meaningless trivia like Russian collusion or mandated pre-existing conditions medical coverage which is just another way to bankrupt the federal government. Covering pre-existing conditions violates the fundamental principles of insurance and allows a fatal problem to insurers called adverse selection, i.e., only sick people buy insurance. The long-term solution to covering pre-existing conditions is to end employer insurance, which you lose when you lose your job or change jobs. If people buy individual health insurance when they are young, new conditions they suffer from later will be covered and unaffected by whom they work for. Older unhealthy people would now be better off if Obamacare had not been passed. But it was so those who cannot get voluntary coverage for those conditions need to deal with that via their own resources and charity. There is no viable alternative. If the government forces insurers to cover those things, the insurers will go bankrupt or raise premiums to the point where people are essentially paying as much for insurance as they would pay to pay cash for the treatments. Politicians telling insurers to pay for pre-existing conditions implies there is a free lunch. There is no free lunch. The only question is who is going to pay for pre-existing conditions. And if the answer is anyone other than those who have them, the assigned payers will go bankrupt.
.
• The national debt-to-GDP ratio is grotesquely high and once against rising at a trillion dollar a year of additional deficit spending rate.
• Trump’s trade war is hurting American exporters and consumers and likely to get worse.
• America is the nation that pharmaceutical companies develop new drugs for. All other nations impose price controls on drugs. Trump says the US government will now pay the same as foreign countries with price controls. Price controls cause supply to shrink to the point of disappearance. In an R&D field like pharmaceuticals, development of new drugs will stop because it will no longer be profitable. Prescription drugs department shelves will go empty. We have already had this with vaccines and it has caused shortages of vaccines. Venezuela’s empty store shelves are what you get when you impose price controls. The response to empty shelves may be nationalization of the pharmaceutical industry which would make the situation even worse.
• U.S. population is on the verge of shrinking and it is too old on average. Our average age is 38.1 according to the CIA FactBook. The world average is 30.4. A graph of the age groups should look like a pyramid. Ours looks like a silo. We must increase immigration by about a million families of five per year.
• U.S. medical care costs per capita are about double the rest of the developed world. But the solution is not to imitate them. They have single payer, pharmaceutical price controls, and waiting lists. We need to free marketize the portion of health care where that would work and private charityize the rest. This was the system we had before World War II price controls that exempted health care created the current, failing, employer-paid system. It is also the system we now have in the three U.S. medical care markets that are NOT overly expensive: dental care, veterinary care, and elective surgery like lasik.
• Education in the U.S. is in trouble. Inner-city union schools are horrible. All schools at all levels have been taken over by socialists teaching socialist ideology. Costs of post-high school education have been exploding far faster than inflation as have student debts. We need to end tenure, federally-guaranteed student loans, grantsmanship, trigger warnings, safe spaces, inability of conservatives to speak on publicly-owned colleges and universities, and denial of due process regarding accusations of sexual misbehavior against male students.
• The national defense is being weakened by funding cuts and by failure to change the hidebound U.S. military. The surface navy including the aircraft carriers are obsolete and have been since the 1950s. The military has more musicians than the State Department has employees. The show-off units cost too much and get too many people killed in the line of show-biz (about 20%) in the Blue Angels, Thunderbirds, and Golden Knights. Also, there are too many ceremonial units like the Old Guard and Marine guards at embassies and the White House. We have too many pilots and not enough pilotless aircraft. Our military is still oriented toward fighting World War II in Europe and not adjusting the using state-of the-art technology to dramatically reduce U.S. casualties and dollar costs of military operations.
• New nuclear nations North Korea and Iran need to be divested of their nuclear capabilities by whatever means necessary. If they are not and use those capabilities to successfully blackmail us, every malevolent nation will get them from North Korea.
• Many of the above problems stem from the fatal flaw of the Constitution of using representative democracy which puts politicians in charge and their incentives are to spend us into federal bankruptcy, to divide us into a 51%-49% groups, to make us angry and afraid of the other side to get out the vote, to assassinate the character of opponents because it works. Government by the politicians, of the politicians, and for the politicians must perish from the earth.
.
The issues being talked about on TV are generally meaningless trivia like Russian collusion or mandated pre-existing conditions medical coverage which is just another way to bankrupt the federal government. Covering pre-existing conditions violates the fundamental principles of insurance and allows a fatal problem to insurers called adverse selection, i.e., only sick people buy insurance. The long-term solution to covering pre-existing conditions is to end employer insurance, which you lose when you lose your job or change jobs. If people buy individual health insurance when they are young, new conditions they suffer from later will be covered and unaffected by whom they work for. Older unhealthy people would now be better off if Obamacare had not been passed. But it was so those who cannot get voluntary coverage for those conditions need to deal with that via their own resources and charity. There is no viable alternative. If the government forces insurers to cover those things, the insurers will go bankrupt or raise premiums to the point where people are essentially paying as much for insurance as they would pay to pay cash for the treatments. Politicians telling insurers to pay for pre-existing conditions implies there is a free lunch. There is no free lunch. The only question is who is going to pay for pre-existing conditions. And if the answer is anyone other than those who have them, the assigned payers will go bankrupt.
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