Sketch 10/13/17

5 Responses to Sketch 10/13/17

1. Michael Anderson says:

   October 13, 2017 at 6:28 pm

   But at least the black man’s “crummy plan” is being wrecked. Trump promised that’s what he was going to do and now he’s doing it. The contents and recipients of the plan are completely and totally irrelevant. Hitler’s strongest supporters were those who suffered the most horrific consequences. Pretend it’s 1937, though of course things are moving much more quickly in the 21st century.

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2. rl crabb says:

   October 15, 2017 at 9:34 am

   As usual, the sourpusses over at Rebane’s Ruminations have dismissed my etching as knee-jerk liberalism. Ho ho! The fix has been in on destroying the ACA since it was enacted. The plan is to replace it with NOTHING. The wretchedly misnamed “Freedom Caucus” will never vote for any healthcare bill that would provide enough funds to pay for costly procedures for the “slackers” who stupidly can’t afford their own healthcare. Every modern nation on the planet has concluded that there must be some government involvement if people aren’t left to suffer and die.
   Rebane holds up Israel as the ideal of a society that rejected socialism in favor of free market solutions, but fails to mention their own healthcare solution… https://ldi.upenn.edu/news/overview-israels-universal-health-care-system

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3. George Rebane says:

   October 15, 2017 at 11:27 am

   America has paid Israel between $3-4B annually forever, just recently signed an agreement to continue paying them about $38B over the next ten years. ALL socialized healthcare systems in developed countries are unsustainable in the operational sense that YoY without continual cuts in services they consume ever larger fractions of their countries’ GDPs. For a country the size of Israel, our annual stipend to them supports quite a bit of residual socialism; money that would otherwise have to be spent on their own defense.

   See also Gregory’s 1151am comment on RR’s recent Scattershots.

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4. Steve Frisch says:

   October 15, 2017 at 3:03 pm

   Not to mention thae fact that the Israeli welfare state is significantly more advanced than the US one, with the fundtional equivaent of universal health care, universal social secuirty, almost free college education, and a strong social saftey net.

   Israel is signaotry to numerous free trade agreements.

   Geroge likes to quote the Index of Economic Freedom as an example of the US economy not being free enough, but the US ranks 11th in the world and Israel ranks 33rd.

   He also seems to be able to look past the fact that the Zionist movement itself was deeply steeped in a sociaist ideal that was central to the founding of the state itself. From its early Kibbutzim movement before its founding, to its founding President, David Ben Gurion, who was an avowed socialist. During its fouding decades Israel had a rigidly controlled economy including both wage and price controls, and import and export controls.

   Currently Israel’s government expenditures as a percentage of GDP are roughly 33% compared to 22% in the US. The average growth of Israel’s GDP over the last 30 years has been roughly 2% per year, about what the US has become accustomed to since in the new century.

   Under the LIkud rule since 1977 Israel has seen the same rise in income inequality and a narrowng of its middle class, which was growing under the socilaist labor parties before the rise of the Likud. In addition Israel has one of the highest proportions of debt to revenue in the developed world…meaning they may say they are capitalists, but they sure have a ton of debt.

   So although it is popular to parrot the Likud line that Israel has moved from socialism to capitalism, they have not, and their capitalist economic policies have increased debt and reduced economic opportunity.

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5. Chris Peterson says:

   October 16, 2017 at 6:09 am

   This Rabane friend of your’s must have wondered as a child why his connect-the-dots picture in the Weekly Reader was so much different than the rest of ours’.

   EVERY nation on Earth, socialized or not, has seen an increase in it’s health expenditures, and the fact that we pay for Israel’s aggression has nothing to do with that. If you’re going to assume that our money is going into their general fund, then we could postulate all manner of idiocies; not just socialized medicine.

   How ’bout that we are paying for the Palestinian prison they run, affectionately named the Gaza. Or perhaps we are supporting their housing industry by building homes in the West Bank. Or, more simply, that we sell them weaponry, and then make sure they can pay for it by giving them a four billion dollar allowance every year.

   But heaven help us, should we ever take care of the sick and poor, especially right in the backyard of every American Christian’s lord and savior. Jesus would be rolling over in his…oh, wait…I forgot…you can’t bury a god.

   America- the best gun care and health regulation money can buy.

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