I care about outcomes, not motivation. Greed is good as long as greed delivers.
“…shorter life spans, limited income and wealth potential…mass incarceration … limited access to educational resources and political participation, state-sanctioned killing by police…”
Even more important is how much the federal government actually collected in taxes during this Golden Age of high taxes on the rich. After all, governments need to collect money to redistribute money. So in the 1950s were federal tax revenues higher than they've been more recently? No.
One way ideologies instill confidence and hope is by romanticizing a time or place where one's ideals were at least partly realized: see, it was done before, so we can do it again, but even better. For some, that romanticized time and place was western Europe and North America during the 1950s*. Exhibit A:…
But the California system uses a rigid, top-down approach that disincentivizes labor-saving innovations in nursing care. That's because California hospitals would still be stuck with the same minimum RN:patient ratios even if ways were found to reduce time spent on some nursing tasks (e.g., documentation).
Who are the one percent? Technically, households with an adjusted gross income of at least $465,626. But who are those people? Many work in occupations that pay so well they have plenty of money available to get richer still through profitable investments. Many work in the following occupations...
It looks like job stress has gone up a bit over the years, while work hours and satisfaction with work load and level of RN staff levels haven't changed much since the implementation of AB 394. Kinda disappointing when you think of the added expense of all those extra RNs and RN hours. This is not at all to say that nurses haven't benefited from the implementation of strict staffing ratios. It just doesn't look like the benefit has been all that great. And then you've got to ask if it's worth it. Because there are costs to these extra costs.
“The basic takeaway from the analysis was that there is variation in quality from hospital to hospital, but that variation it is not correlated with for-profit status.” Maybe For-Profit Hospitals Aren't So Bad, Harvard.edu Blog
US healthcare spending is almost twice that of the other developed countries. Pharmaceuticals and medical goods (e.g., medical supplies and devices) are a relatively small part of that difference. If we knocked off, say, $200 a year in drugs and medical goods, we'd hardly make a dent in overall US healthcare spending – which is approaching a per capita average of $10,000 a year.
Americans aren't just skimping on preventative care and treatment; in order to pay their medical bills, they're cutting back on food, clothing, and basic household items.
First we've got to get a handle on what the US actually spends on healthcare. According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (National Health Expenditures 2016 Highlights - CMS.gov), US healthcare spending reached $3.3 trillion in 2016, or $10,348 per person. That represents 17.9% of the gross domestic product (GDP). For comparison, the “Comparable Rich Country” average for healthcare spending was $5169 per person in 2016 (10-12% of GDP, depending on the specific country).
Problems are problems because they conflict with desired outcomes. Exploring a problem space may start with the desired outcome (universal but affordable health care!) or with a "problem-alert": the sense that something is wrong. Part of exploring a problem space is refining, clarifying, or figuring out what the desired outcome is. Part of that process is refining, clarifying, or figuring out what the actual problem is.
Up-front costs impede the adoption of sustainable practices and technologies. So we need to create incentives for farmers to make that initial investment. Want more farmers to adopt no-till cultivation? Allow farmers to deduct the entire cost of expensive no-till planters in the first year of purchase.
…By virtue of their antipathy to Trump, making Democrats into vocal deficit hawks and free traders so that even if they win back Congress or the Whitehouse, it would be hard to change their tune.
In the case of corn-soybean farmers in Michigan, winter cover crops can delay or complicate spring planting; land that is not tilled for years might be invaded by difficult-to-control weeds; reducing fertilizer, insecticide, and herbicide use may sacrifice crop yield and boost the risk of herbicide-resistant insects and weeds. These are real concerns in a low-margin business.
“…Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes understood that great revelations create great enemies. He once warned: “You never need think you can overturn any old falsehood without a terrible squirming and scattering of the horrid little population that dwells under it.”
“When inequality loses its association with hope and instead becomes interpreted as a signal of a rigged society, higher inequality relates to lower well-being” (Buttrick, N. R., S. J. Heintzelman, et al., 2017).
More land for agriculture means less land for grasslands, wetlands, and forests. Looking at the Big Picture, "sparing" the wild things is better than "sharing" with them. Of course, there will always be exceptions, but that's the general rule.
There are things I care about… I want the biosphere to survive, relatively intact. I want every human to have a home… The list goes on. There's no way to justify the list. No first principles that can withstand scrutiny.
... Averaged across the above groups, 24% of Republicans surveyed by Pew considered economic inequality to be a "very big" problem, compared to 62% of the Democrats surveyed.