Re: Samuelson: "It's More Than Social Security"
From: Kent Paul Dolan (xanthian_at_well.com)
Date: 01/18/05
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Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 06:55:28 +0000 (UTC)
"The Trucker" <mikcob@verizon.net> wrote
> Kent Paul Dolan wrote:
>> "The Trucker" <mikcob@verizon.net> wrote:
>>> A word of caution:
>> With respect to the ongoing discussion,
>> "that isn't right; that isn't even wrong".
> I see _no_ error in what I have posted and
> posited.
And this has what to do with the errors others see,
aside from being a prime example of why authors need
editors? Even Roy admitted you were out of line, and
he's nominally on your side.
> Health care will continue to account for more and
> more of the GDP because other costs (other then
> rent) continue to decline with advancing
> technology.
Nonsense. Between two of my automobile purchases,
the dollar cost of an ordinary sedan _tripled_, not
just once, but three times in a row. Inflation has
been harsh, but not that harsh. My first purchase of
a new auto, the first "square look" Volvo sedan
year, now costs upwards of twentyfold more in
unadjusted dollars. The twenty dollars that filled
the trunk _and_ back seat of my grandmother's
Cadillac with layers of bags of groceries, will now
not fill a single paper bag. The two dollars that
would fill a big car with gasoline, won't buy a
gallon today in California.
You are paying far too much attention to computer
technology, and assuming its cost curve is widely
shared. Such is profoundly not the case. The world
has long been laboring with economies of ever
increasing scarcity, and that is more true now than
ever. Go check the price trend of copper in real
dollars, for example, since the mines mostly have
gone barren.
> Medical care is quite the opposite. New stuff
> keeps getting invented _BECAUSE_ the sky is the
> limit. That is both good and bad. The burning
> question I have is: Would new stuff still get
> invented if the sky wasn't the limit?
What field _isn't_ subject to innovation? I just
read that over 60% of US crops are now grown from
genetically engineered seed.
> And a second question would be: Do we really
> _need_ this fast a pace in the invention of new
> medical technology? Maybe it is just costing
> _too_ much.
Said the person who'd not yet reached the stage in
life where survival is a battle between medical
progress and effects of aging.
My current spouse is alive today _only_ because of
heroic efforts that held her cancer at bay until a
better treatment protocol could be discovered. Now,
though her cancer may never be cured, her former
two year life expectancy has been extended until she
is more likely to die of extreme old age than of her
cancer. Fairly nice results, as far as our nine year
old son is concerned. Was the early, heavy expense
then unjustified? I think not.
>> Why do you "caution" me only to publish words
>> that agree with me?
> I was interjecting a different point as opposed to
> debating you. If EVERYTHING is robotized _except_
> medical care then medical care will consume a
> whopping percentage of GDP.
That has no chance to be the case, it already is
not. I'm not sure what is your normal posting venue,
but this is being seen and responded to from
talk.bizarre, where we tend not to be so careless of
our facts:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=medical+robots
Some years ago, I interviewed for, but failed to
win, a job in Davis, California, programming a robot
that excavates the top of a thigh bone from which a
decayed hip ball has been sawn away, for insertion
of a prosthesis, so carefully matched by the
robot-bored hole that the prosthesis would require
no glue. This was sometime in the last millennium,
so you are _way_ behind reality with your
understanding of the status of medical robotics.
> Most especially this will be true if the rentiers
> of the society insist on living forever and can
> actually pay for it.
Since no treatment for immortality exists, you are
simply blowing smoke. Those who value their current
life as more win than loss, and can pay for the
treatments that will keep them healthy, are surely
perfectly within their rights to do so. Your use of
your favorite pejorative to tar them is simple
bigotry.
Since much of medical care is needed by the elderly,
and since they have passed through their prime
earning years and are relatively flush compared to
the young, there is some social equity problem with
private medicine being driven mostly by the needs of
the elderly, that public health care could smooth
out.
However, it isn't at all clear that the cash flow
driving medical progress, which benefited my then
three year old when he needed a cat scan for a tumor,
with a device probably mostly funded in development
for the needs of the elderly, would still pertain if
the US shifted to a public health system.
The experience in Oregon, which uses pure dollar
considerations to triage state funding of indigent
health care, so that a lukemia victim is free to die
or to find other funding because lukemia is
expensive to treat, suggests that public health care
would not be an unblemished blessing.
So, we have expensive health care, but that expense
drives innovation that benefits everyone.
That doesn't say much pro or con about Samuelson's
warning against an elderly voter cohort that is
happy to vote itself benefits funded by other's
taxes, though, wich was where this multilog began.
>> xanthian, been _dying_ to use that quote for
>> over a day now, finally managed to wedge it
>> in somehow.
>> And BTW, last I heard, the biggest export of
>> the US was still agricultural products. Try
>> telling Joe U.S. Farmer "everything has been
>> automated", and the spray of his chewing
>> tobacco as he laughs in your face will make
>> quote a mess of you.
> This example is really a joke.
Well, no, but your ignorance will be happy to try to
make it one.
> Automation in farming and fertilization and insect
> control and all the rest are creating more and
> more production.
You and Roy share your muddling of "automation"
versus mere "mechanization"; the latter has been
ongoing since Eli Whitney's cotton gin and
McCormic's reaper, the former is barely beginning to
have an impact, and is mostly still in the research
stages.
Sadly, that "more and more production" is still
being wildly outstripped by population growth. Most
of the world's more densely populated countries, for
example, are now dependent on "super rice" first
developed in the US, but hunger has grown no less,
as the US is politically highly averse to exporting
our birth control technology, the needed fix for
hunger worldwide.
> The farmer chewing on tobacco is a very small
> portion of agribiz. But you did pick the area
> bolstered directly by land rent.
Sorry, but I just don't buy Roy's one trick pony.
Land is a finite and unexpandable resource. If you
tax it to "punish" concentrated holdings of land,
you merely return the US to the inefficiencies of
smaller farms. Such stupidity would be its own
reward, and the tax would merely be returned to
the landholders from the shelves of your grocery
store.
Most businesses are simply _immune_ to taxes, they
just fold them into product prices, and since the
taxes are evenly imposed on their competitors as
well, there is no imbalance to elicit lower prices.
In the end, taxes can only be paid in a way felt by
the taxpayer, by the consumer, or by the landholder
whose land produces no income, and these,
unfortunately for you "one trick pony" types, are
the bulk of the voters.
> My point is that proportion of GDP is very much
> dependent upon the cost of labor, and other than
> importing H1B wage slaves from India and Pakistan
> there is not much else that can be done under a
> Bush/Republican/Rentier/screw-all-but-the-rich
> system.
Sorry, but you got to spewing hate there so heavily
your meaning got lost.
The rich have owned the rest of us in all but name
throughout recorded history, and surely before that.
So, how about we get rid of the rich? Well, no.
What we learned from the failed British experiment
in confiscatory taxes on earned income is that it
merely impoverishes the nation when there are no
private concentrations of wealth from which venture
capital can flow guided by shrewd and proven
intelligence (as specifically contrasted to
"guided by civil servants") known to be able to use
wealth to create more wealth.
What we are learning from the ongoing confiscatory
British land/property tax is that it is possible to
drag even the nobility down to the level where they
have to sell tickets to keep their manors, but that
the poor do not thereby suddenly become inhabitants
of manors. Again, all that is accomplished is the
impoverishment of the nation, this time culturally
as well as economically. No one will pay manor
builders to build manors any more, the tax system
has made them impractical, and so an entire nation's
finest craftspersons have been essentially taxed
out of existence.
Jealousy is an ugly thing to use as a basis for a
tax policy.
"One trick ponies", after you watch them for a
while, tend, to the sane person, to lose their
attraction.
Only the obsessed cannot learn to let go.
You choose your lifestyle and level of sane thought
for yourself, I'm certainly in no position to do so
for you, merely to snipe from the sidelines at your
ongoing choices.
HTH
xanthian.
Among other reasons I can't do that for you is that
I am cripplingly, disablingly insane, but that's a
story google can tell you, no need to repeat it here.
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