OP ED-"Little Timmy Wants to Know Why Nobody Likes Airplanes Anymore?

[flyboy0681]

Actually, mine was 41% last year between federal, state and sales tax. Not counting various fees. Then $1400 a month for health insurance on top of that. Maybe I'm starting to see why people are revolting. At least in Europe you get something for you taxes, here it's mostly YouTube videos of predator strikes and homeless vets. But yes, most middle income people actually pay very little in taxes and their pain would be considerably greater than mine if tea party ideas were actually implemented. But yet they vote for them. It comes down to the issue of "fairness", because they don't think in terms percentages, so while they work their asses off trying to make ends meet, they see someone in the store using their $120 a month in EBT and think how unfair that is to them. That's the though process that drives them.

 

No state income tax here. But aren't your state income taxes deductible on your 1040?

 

I pay $1,250 a month towards my own ACA policy (no subsidies), soon to be $1,450. I don't like it, but it's a necessary evil given how uninsurable my family, including me, is. I know that my low premium is on the backs of hard working American's and how they are subsidizing my premiums. Actually there must be something to it, prior to my ACA plan I was getting socked with a minimum of 25 to 30% increase a year. 

[flyboy0681]

You're going to call me a bullshitter, ok, I'm going to call you a dumb asshole who can't read:

 

http://www2.illinois.gov/hfs/SiteCollectionDocuments/birthcenter_feeschedule.pdf

 

Delivery services, $1,713.00, and yes, the hospital is still making money. Where is the 30K?

 

That's inline with what I'm seeing for the managed care reimbursement rate for that procedure code in that state.

[AndyFromCB]

Anyways, if there is anything Obama is impeachable for, it's this. And it's much bigger than all the fake old scandals. I wonder how long before Holder starts his new cushy multimillion a year job with stock options. Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, etc, etc, etc. All owned by banks.

 

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-9-billion-witness-20141106

[Guest]

Oh do please tell us about the great health care systems in Canada, Greece, England and France. None of us "commoners" have ever studied foreign healthcare delivery systems ... and even if we did ... we aren't bright enough to draw our own conclusions.

Dave,

No health care system is perfect, ours in Canada, yours in the States or any other number of countries. We may pay more taxes percentage wise than most in the US, but don't pay huge health insurance premiums. I guess you can pay lower taxes, then pay the premiums afterward. In the end we still only have so many dollars left to enjoy no matter which system you live within.

No one here is denied care because of finances, I don't know about the US. I know my departed sister inlaw always said she would never have gotten or been able to afford the cancer treatment she got here in Canada. I know of others who have moved from the US to Canada because their pre-existing condition disqualified them from US health care. How can this occur in the wealthiest country on the planet?

Not trying to pick a fight, just my perspective from here,

Clarence

[jetdriven]

President's proposed spending 2015-

Social Security-33%

Medicaire-27%

Military-16%

Byron-Where are you getting your stats on military spending?

Whitehouse.gov. But it's at the CBO site too. Where did your numbers come from?

[flyboy0681]

Anyways, if there is anything Obama is impeachable for, it's this. And it's much bigger than all the fake old scandals. I wonder how long before Holder starts his new cushy multimillion a year job with stock options. Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, etc, etc, etc. All owned by banks.

 

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-9-billion-witness-20141106

 

It took me a while to read the whole thing but I'm just livid - but not surprised.

 

Seems to me that these guys are guilty of at least one thing: signing the SOX statement that they hold true all the information that they are about to sign off on .

[John Pleisse]

You're going to call me a bullshitter, ok, I'm going to call you a ignorant loudmouth who can't read:

 

http://www2.illinois.gov/hfs/SiteCollectionDocuments/birthcenter_feeschedule.pdf

 

Delivery services, $1,713.00, and yes, the hospital is still making money. Where is the 30K?

 

This is just flat out wrong. Immigrant women birthing children may get this as  pay out or subsidy, but the reality is most immigrant women don't get prenatal care, live tough lives and are not doing standard V-birth at birthing centers. In your summation, immigrant women don't have C-sections, don't stay in the hospital, don't have issues.....they just show up in Yoga pants with a broken placenta after their Lamaz class and get a standard fee of $1,700. In California, Illegal Immigrant women represent 1/3 of all government subsidized births at a rate of 150,000 per 5 million.....$3k average payout. You do what all insurance people do, you omit, prenatal, postpartum care, complications, extra anesthesia, C-sections, complications after birthing and a two week NNICU visit for $250k that can skew average numbers wildly. $30k??? You bet you ass. Your assertion "the hospital is still making money" is fabulous. This is where costs skyrocket and hospital companies/systems eat losses that are passed on to the tax payer as massive tax deductions. This notion is the very essence of why healthcare has failed. I can assure you, at a rate of $1,700 per illegal immigrant birth, hospitals are losing significantly more money. Here are reasonable numbers from people who don't have a dog on the race and just want to help women.

 

http://transform.childbirthconnection.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/California.pdf

 

As to your comment about malpractice, is the insurance rate was truly16%, then there would be at least 600 billion of premium floating around. Total insurance premium for all lines, I repeat all lines (excluding health), in US, was $1.1 trillion in 2012. That's a fact, that's a report on my desk.

 

Again, you have forgotten hospitals and doctors settle claims that far exceed their insurance. It is interesting you bring this up. Malpractice rates are so high in Maryland for Obstetricians, most can't operate and have quit working. Reference the above report on your desk....let's see it. You are waving your wand and contriving numbers. The average physician paying a quarter of their gross in malpractice is common place and frankly higher for specialists. You write malpractice policies, right? So you are in the know, right?

 

 ACA didn't change anything for self-employed who had adequate coverage prior to ACA.

 

This is patently false and suggests you are being intentionally deceptive and not in command of your business. The ACA has eliminated wide swaths of self employment categories and made them illegal for insurance companies to sell in groups, forcing business owners to go single payer.  I know, I just lost my policy and we were covered in top shelf plan with UHC

 

What you had was a substandard plan that would have put your potentially expensive medical event on tax payer's back once you run out of your $500K lifetime limit. Now you're paying the true cost of you being alive and not dumping most of your risk on the the government like you did previously.

 

This is a bullshit response and you knew it before you wrote it. Family of five, UHC PPO, zero deduct, $2k per month, no health issues. Again, since you are in the insurance biz, I can only assume you are being intentionally deceptive.

 

And clearly, even when presented with all the information needed to realize where to lay the blame, with the person standing right in front of you, you choose not to use that big organ between your earns, you chose to blame everyone but the surgeon who grosses $3 million a year. Well, now you know why your premiums are so expensive. He makes $3 million a year.

 

So, let me get this straight....in your world, a top surgeon making $3 mil a year is a problem? I'd rather have him any day, than someone less accomplished. Good doctors should make money, lots of money and never apologize for it. That isn't the problem. You know it isn't. 

 

Now you know why we think you're all so dumb.

 

From you....this is a high compliment.

 

 

Well, because you are, because you can only connect two dots and never seethe big picture. And it drives us crazy. It's not a liberal vs conservative. It's stupid vs smart.

 

Ah, liberal intellectual superiority. Another smarty pants with lots of numbers, stats and not a lick of common sense.

 

I know why my premiums are expensive. It's because my surgeon neighbor two houses down has a Porsche 911 Turbo, actually, a 34 Porsche collection.

 

Again, I'd invite him over for steaks and get to know him. Your life may depend on it someday.

 

Just for once admit, that you don't know the facts, you don't care about the facts and you just like to repeat Fox news drivel:

 

Ah, the last bulkhead of low-ball name calling, when you can't argue on merit. 

 

 

 

 I'm out. Oh....I left the chart here so you could double check it. /:-).

[jetdriven]

WRT social security it's a separately funded program that doesn't cobtribute to the deficit. How about that military budget and the last 2 wars?

[alex]

With this kind of flexibility liberal/progressives should be able to lower their colonoscopy costs in no time...

[jetdriven]

OK, You are looking only at discretionary spending. Got it.

Maybe we can cut out all the social security and use that money to pay for the defense budget.

[Andy95W]

I'm not trying to hijack this thread, but I saw I couple of things the last few days and didn't know where else to post.

I was in Chicago O'Hare Monday and saw a guy with a Wounded Warrior t-shirt and a prosthetic left leg, and a service dog. I asked if I could help, just as I noticed another guy in a wheelchair, missing his right leg, come up to us. He said, "no thanks, we have two good legs between us."

Wow. Lose a limb and still be able to crack a joke.

Today I saw the new HBO documentary "The Last Patrol" about some veterans struggling through the transition from war to peace. They keep asking the people they meet, "what makes America great?"

Not "what's wrong with America". EVERYBODY has an opinion about that. It was surprising the similarity of the answers people gave to what makes us great.

We need to tell Timmy why America is so great, and while we're at it, why Aviation is so great too. Then maybe if little Timmy puts down his electronic devices, he may just learn to love Airplanes too.

As Scott put it so eloquently in post #1000:

I Love my wife and family

I Love my Country

I Love my Mooney

And I thank God we still have soldiers like the ones I met Monday.

[flyboy0681]

 Why not have ALL take a little hit NOW rather than future recipients?

 

 

I guess my liberal side needs to rear its ugly head now. A great deal of SS recipients count on their measly $250 a week stipend to survive each month. If I'm hearing you correctly, you want to cut it. What's a little, 15%? 25%.

[flyboy0681]

I was told DO NOT count on it. No guarantee. It is "pay as you go"...

Why no sacrifice now?

 

Not sure who told you that but I believe it will be here for decades to come. There may be means testing and such, but it will be around.

 

The SS Administration says that it will be solvent until at least 2030. I'll be eligible and drawing on it long before that time, and I assume you will be as well. 

[flyboy0681]

Really? What a selfish statement. I'll get mine...so

Keep on keep'n on?

I plan to work ten more years...That's 2025. Five years of solvency for something I have mandatory deduction for all my adult working life.

What a crock. You act like 2030 is way down the highway. What about my children that are about to enter the workforce?

MOST SELFISH GENEATION....

 

 

I recommend that you take a chill pill and let your blood pressure come down. Let's revisit this issue in 15 years.

 

Keep in mind that until Reagan shored up the SS system in 1983, it was supposed to be insolvent by now.

[AndyFromCB]

I recommend that you take a chill pill and let your blood pressure come down. Let's revisit this issue in 15 years.

 

Keep in mind that until Reagan shored up the SS system in 1983, it was supposed to be insolvent by now.

 

Except that the walking corpse Reagan didn't shore anything up (as Gore Vidal once said, Reagan was a triumph of mortician's art). He simply lowered taxes for the wealthy and made middle class pickup the tab via SS taxes that were used to pay discretionary spending and then put the rest of the tab. I know most here don't understand compounding, but RR is the reason why we have a massive debt to begin with. So when Romney says that 47% don't pay taxes, he clearly misses the point that every working poor person already pays more as a percentage of their minimum wage check than Romney paid the year before he started running for president. His overall tax rate was 13%, mine was 41%. I know why my taxes are high and it's not because the poor are stealing from me ;-) 

[flyboy0681]

Except that the walking corpse Reagan didn't shore anything up (as Gore Vidal once said, Reagan was a triumph of mortician's art). He simply lowered taxes for the wealthy and made middle class pickup the tab via SS taxes that were used to pay discretionary spending and then put the rest of the tab. I know most here don't understand compounding, but RR is the reason why we have a massive debt to begin with. So when Romney says that 47% don't pay taxes, he clearly misses the point that every working poor person already pays more as a percentage of their minimum wage check than Romney paid the year before he started running for president. His overall tax rate was 13%, mine was 41%. I know why my taxes are high and it's not because the poor are stealing from me ;-) 

 

So the increase in the SS payroll tax coupled with extending the retirement age further out didn't shore up the system?

[AndyFromCB]

So the increase in the SS payroll tax coupled with extending the retirement age further out didn't shore up the system?

Not really if the money collected was spend supporting Taliban in Afghanistan and the Contra's and buying pie in the sky weapons systems. I don't especially like to agree with Scott, but SS always depends on future generations to pay the current tab as the money is simply spent the year it's received. I understand that an IOU is issued and that US government will never default on it (because we will never run out of ink, or actually, bits) but in order to keep inflation in check, the system heavily depends on more people paying into than withdrawing, so it is a very definition of a pyramid scheme...

[flyboy0681]

Not really if the money collected was spend supporting Taliban in Afghanistan and the Contra's and buying pie in the sky weapons systems.

 

This has been a teaching moment and I have evolved.

 

Imagine that, this bleeding heart liberal changed his view on something.

[carusoam]

"EVERYONE SAYS IT IS SO COMPLICATED. IT ISN'T. IT IS TAXES/REVENUES AND SPENDING. HOW ABOUT AT LEAST BALANCING A BUDGET? HOW ABOUT BEGINNING TO MOVE TOWARD BALANCING A BUDGET?" - SFI

Now I'm getting on board...

Where is the banker?

Best regards,

-a-

[flyboy0681]

"EVERYONE SAYS IT IS SO COMPLICATED. IT ISN'T. IT IS TAXES/REVENUES AND SPENDING. HOW ABOUT AT LEAST BALANCING A BUDGET? HOW ABOUT BEGINNING TO MOVE TOWARD BALANCING A BUDGET?" - SFI

Now I'm getting on board...

Where is the banker?

Best regards,

-a-

 

 

We already had a balanced budget and surplus. It was way overrated.

[carusoam]

Pyramid, yes...

Ponzi, not so much...

-a-

[AndyFromCB]

"EVERYONE SAYS IT IS SO COMPLICATED. IT ISN'T. IT IS TAXES/REVENUES AND SPENDING. HOW ABOUT AT LEAST BALANCING A BUDGET? HOW ABOUT BEGINNING TO MOVE TOWARD BALANCING A BUDGET?" - SFI

Now I'm getting on board...

Where is the banker?

Best regards,

-a-

 

We will never balance the budget. At this point it's not possible to do. Feds biggest fear is not inflation but deflation. With inflation, the debt simply "disappears" and in order for it to disappear we have to continuously borrow more making the debt larger. Makes sense, doesn't it, but it's true. Deflation would make the entire system collapse and the Europeans are now starting to realize it as well and are saying fuck it to the whole austerity fiasco.

[scottfromiowa]

I recommend that you take a chill pill and let your blood pressure come down. Let's revisit this issue in 15 years.

 

Keep in mind that until Reagan shored up the SS system in 1983, it was supposed to be insolvent by now.

Good advise.

Tik Tok...Can kicked down the road.

[scottfromiowa]

Pyramid, yes...

Ponzi, not so much...

-a-

Democratic...Republic

Ponzi...Pyramid

Thank you all so much for the awesome clarifications. Keep 'em coming

[scottfromiowa]

Also good to know you can say F$%K...Just not tell someone to F%^K off without getting banned...