Re: What you thinkcrash_mccormickNovember 7 2012, 02:30:41 UTC
Sin Taxes do work but they are not universally effective. In the cases I am aware of they are a complex function of rates relative to incomes, addictiveness, and other social pressures.
I know people who were able to make the change with varying difficulty for financial reasons.
OTOH I am comfortable with targeting money from behaviors with social costs to those activities. Tax gambling to fund treatment programs based on their effectiveness, etc.
The issue of how we fund health care is related. Sadly people are almost never willing to start out from the "You are poor, you get sick, you die" position and then add services and distribute costs honestly until they reach a level of support they are comfortable with.
Re: What you thinkebartleyNovember 7 2012, 05:32:21 UTC
When you look at it closely, health care winds up presenting us with a choice: either (1) we forbid people to pay for treatments that could save their lives / health / comfort, or (2) we accept that your chance of surviving medical difficulties / retaining or regaining well-being depends on your ability to pay. We can forestall this choice much of the time by cost-shifting onto third parties - and we do, and most of the arguments about health care boil down to how often and when we should do so; fairly few take the position that the government should never pay for health care. But resources are ultimately limited, and unless we make self-pay and medical tourism illegal Bill Gates's hypothetical son is likely to live longer when struck by a rare disease than my son is.
We cringe away from honestly on health care and funding health care because we're ultimately faced with an unpleasant choice. And IMO it is right that we cringe at the thought of telling people they can't buy something which might save their life, or their child's
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Pretty much. The entire point of government is to do collectively what we cannot do individually -- e.g., provide standards and agencies of consumer protection, maintain military and diplomatic corps, design/build/maintain/upgrade infrastructure, protect natural resources, etc., etc. They're also really good at things that shouldn't be for-profit, e.g., education, health care, etc. There's also reason to invest in preserving and encouraging culture and freedom of expression.
Taxes are our fee for that. You're basically paying for civilization, community, society.
You can tell regressive (as opposed to progressive) taxes/fees/laws/whatever by a simple quality: they try to discourage, rather than encourage, a behavior. They are exclusionary. (For instance: prayer in schools. No one ever tries to enforce by legislation a prayer to Buddha, Amaterasu, Cthulhu, Ba'al, or the FSM.)
Likely true -- but not a decision I am perfectly qualified to make.
In the end, I'm more interested in voting for someone I agree with on what I am sure of (as much as possible -- I think outside of the pirate party, nobody in politics seems to share much of my priorities, and even there there are differences) and go for a sense of competence and non-corruption for the stuff that's much more of a judgement call.
Very much so. to p1. Government, like corporations, is about collecting resources for a greater effect for the contributors. The primary difference being that government is putatively not beholden to any individual contributors, and so is better able to handle collective goods (rather than handling them so long as there is profit in it
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The problem with jumping to polymarriage is that the marriage benefits are either nonsensical or exploitable when n>1 where n is number of spouses you have. Incomplete marriage graphs make things difficult too. A whole new marriage structure is imaginable, but it would be so much work to get there from here that it's hard to imagine the transition. SSM is easy comparatively.
There's also the problem that it you whisper polygamy, the crazies will scream shariah.
Oh, yes, absolutely. There are very good reasons to want poly-marriage -- and also some very big and non-trivial barriers in the way (the ones I usually quote are the same ones you list--not getting jumped on by the people who equate polymarriage with poly-gyno man-centricism and the huge legal complexity of non-exclusive marraige (including either dealing with the potential abuses or making them non-trivial without making marriage explicitly punishing).
Still, this doesn't prevent it from being a worthy goal--it is; just a difficult one.
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I know people who were able to make the change with varying difficulty for financial reasons.
OTOH I am comfortable with targeting money from behaviors with social costs to those activities. Tax gambling to fund treatment programs based on their effectiveness, etc.
The issue of how we fund health care is related. Sadly people are almost never willing to start out from the "You are poor, you get sick, you die" position and then add services and distribute costs honestly until they reach a level of support they are comfortable with.
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We cringe away from honestly on health care and funding health care because we're ultimately faced with an unpleasant choice. And IMO it is right that we cringe at the thought of telling people they can't buy something which might save their life, or their child's ( ... )
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Taxes are our fee for that. You're basically paying for civilization, community, society.
You can tell regressive (as opposed to progressive) taxes/fees/laws/whatever by a simple quality: they try to discourage, rather than encourage, a behavior. They are exclusionary. (For instance: prayer in schools. No one ever tries to enforce by legislation a prayer to Buddha, Amaterasu, Cthulhu, Ba'al, or the FSM.)
A military is highly necessary. Wish it weren't.
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In the end, I'm more interested in voting for someone I agree with on what I am sure of (as much as possible -- I think outside of the pirate party, nobody in politics seems to share much of my priorities, and even there there are differences) and go for a sense of competence and non-corruption for the stuff that's much more of a judgement call.
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There's also the problem that it you whisper polygamy, the crazies will scream shariah.
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Still, this doesn't prevent it from being a worthy goal--it is; just a difficult one.
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