Progressives and The Venezuelan Political Tactics

[Patooka]

I get what you mean. I think it's crap, but thank you for the clarification. Government doing governmenty things doesn't always lead to the Capital Wasteland.

 

[bilby]

So all countries with universal healthcare end up like Venezuela. That's as fucking stupid as saying all free market countries and up like Somalia.

No single drop thinks it is responsible for the flood. You are asking which one drop caused the flood.

So it's a false economy to 'balance the budget', when you could instead borrow to invest in infrastructure. As long as interest rates are low, and the infrastructure is genuinely helpful.

You know, you could have both a balanced budget and spending on infrastructure. Just make sure you have enough coming in from taxes to pay for it. It is saner that way.

No, it's not. That would be like refusing to buy a house until you have saved up enough to pay cash for it - and paying rent while you wait for your savings to accumulate.

Our future grandchildren are wealthier and living in a much richer economy than us. Why the fuck shouldn't they pay their share for the infrastructure that gave them their wealth?

Why should a poor person from 2019 pay the full cost of a road that the much richer people in 2119 will still be using? Let the future population pay their share.

There's nothing sane about donating huge capital value infrastructure free of charge to a future population who are far better able to afford it than we are.

You are mistaking 'easier for me to think about' with 'more sane'. That's OK - if you don't want to do the hard thinking, others can do it for you; But please don't try to contribute answers, if you're not prepared to understand the complexity of the questions.

 

[PyramidHead]

Report Finds US Sanctions on Venezuela Are Responsible for Tens of Thousands of Deaths

“Venezuela’s economic crisis is routinely blamed all on Venezuela,” said Jeffrey Sachs, co-author of the paper. “But it is much more than that. American sanctions are deliberately aiming to wreck Venezuela’s economy and thereby lead to regime change. It’s a fruitless, heartless, illegal, and failed policy, causing grave harm to the Venezuelan people.”

Among the results of broad economic sanctions implemented by the Trump administration since August 2017:

An estimated more than 40,000 deaths from 2017–18;

The sanctions have reduced the availability of food and medicine, and increased disease and mortality;

The August 2017 sanctions contributed to a sharp decline in oil production that caused great harm to the civilian population;

The US sanctions implemented since January, if they continue will almost certainly result in tens of thousands more avoidable deaths;

This is based on an estimated 80,000 people with HIV who have not had antiretroviral treatment since 2017, 16,000 people who need dialysis, 16,000 people with cancer, and 4 million with diabetes and hypertension (many of whom cannot obtain insulin or cardiovascular medicine);

Since the sanctions that began in January 2019, oil production has fallen by 431,000 barrels per day or 36.4 percent. This will greatly accelerate the humanitarian crisis, but the projected 67 percent decline in oil production for the year, if the sanctions continue, would cause vastly more loss of human life.

If you are an apologist for this and use it to argue against childcare services for poor black families living in Philadelphia then I kindly suggest you lie down in traffic

 

[Canard DuJour]

Economics does not exist as a mathematical engineering problem and never has. It has always been, and will continue to be, political and cultural at its core.

That doesn't mean it's impervious to hard physical constraints. How those constraints are managed "has always been, and will continue to be, political and cultural at its core". Someone called it dialectical materialism (silly expression IMO).

It's hard to know from outside what exactly has happened in - or to - Venezuela. But it does indeed look like there has been economic sabotage orchestrated by a superior power with an ideological agenda and previous as long as your arm.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Report Finds US Sanctions on Venezuela Are Responsible for Tens of Thousands of Deaths

“Venezuela’s economic crisis is routinely blamed all on Venezuela,” said Jeffrey Sachs, co-author of the paper. “But it is much more than that. American sanctions are deliberately aiming to wreck Venezuela’s economy and thereby lead to regime change. It’s a fruitless, heartless, illegal, and failed policy, causing grave harm to the Venezuelan people.”

Among the results of broad economic sanctions implemented by the Trump administration since August 2017:

An estimated more than 40,000 deaths from 2017–18;

The sanctions have reduced the availability of food and medicine, and increased disease and mortality;

The August 2017 sanctions contributed to a sharp decline in oil production that caused great harm to the civilian population;

The US sanctions implemented since January, if they continue will almost certainly result in tens of thousands more avoidable deaths;

This is based on an estimated 80,000 people with HIV who have not had antiretroviral treatment since 2017, 16,000 people who need dialysis, 16,000 people with cancer, and 4 million with diabetes and hypertension (many of whom cannot obtain insulin or cardiovascular medicine);

Since the sanctions that began in January 2019, oil production has fallen by 431,000 barrels per day or 36.4 percent. This will greatly accelerate the humanitarian crisis, but the projected 67 percent decline in oil production for the year, if the sanctions continue, would cause vastly more loss of human life.

If you are an apologist for this and use it to argue against childcare services for poor black families living in Philadelphia then I kindly suggest you lie down in traffic

The sanctions have nothing to do with these deaths. Oil production is crashing because they haven't been doing the maintenance.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

I get what you mean. I think it's crap, but thank you for the clarification. Government doing governmenty things doesn't always lead to the Capital Wasteland.

Government doing a few things doesn't lead to collapse. The more things it does the more it leads to collapse. You are saying "since a few drops don't cause a flood therefore a lot of drops don't cause a flood either."

 

[bilby]

I get what you mean. I think it's crap, but thank you for the clarification. Government doing governmenty things doesn't always lead to the Capital Wasteland.

Government doing a few things doesn't lead to collapse. The more things it does the more it leads to collapse. You are saying "since a few drops don't cause a flood therefore a lot of drops don't cause a flood either."

And you are saying "since a lot of drops form a flood, drought is a desirable and worthy goal".

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

If you think universal healthcare and student loan forgiveness caused Venezuela's collapse, then you're opinion on the issue is far too stupid to address.

No you fool. Promising the people free everything and ruining the economy trying to do it.

I keep forgetting that when steve_bank says people are saying something, they must be. I'm tired of this right-wing garbage.

 

[ZiprHead]

If you think universal healthcare and student loan forgiveness caused Venezuela's collapse, then you're opinion on the issue is far too stupid to address.

No you fool. Promising the people free everything and ruining the economy trying to do it.

I keep forgetting that when steve_bank says people are saying something, they must be. I'm tired of this right-wing garbage.

Oh, but we're the fools.

 

[Trausti]

Report Finds US Sanctions on Venezuela Are Responsible for Tens of Thousands of Deaths

“Venezuela’s economic crisis is routinely blamed all on Venezuela,” said Jeffrey Sachs, co-author of the paper. “But it is much more than that. American sanctions are deliberately aiming to wreck Venezuela’s economy and thereby lead to regime change. It’s a fruitless, heartless, illegal, and failed policy, causing grave harm to the Venezuelan people.”

Among the results of broad economic sanctions implemented by the Trump administration since August 2017:

An estimated more than 40,000 deaths from 2017–18;

The sanctions have reduced the availability of food and medicine, and increased disease and mortality;

The August 2017 sanctions contributed to a sharp decline in oil production that caused great harm to the civilian population;

The US sanctions implemented since January, if they continue will almost certainly result in tens of thousands more avoidable deaths;

This is based on an estimated 80,000 people with HIV who have not had antiretroviral treatment since 2017, 16,000 people who need dialysis, 16,000 people with cancer, and 4 million with diabetes and hypertension (many of whom cannot obtain insulin or cardiovascular medicine);

Since the sanctions that began in January 2019, oil production has fallen by 431,000 barrels per day or 36.4 percent. This will greatly accelerate the humanitarian crisis, but the projected 67 percent decline in oil production for the year, if the sanctions continue, would cause vastly more loss of human life.

If you are an apologist for this and use it to argue against childcare services for poor black families living in Philadelphia then I kindly suggest you lie down in traffic

Right. It's US sanctions that caused the expropriation of private business leading to food shortages in a country which, due to its geography and topography, should be have an abundance of food. FFS.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

Report Finds US Sanctions on Venezuela Are Responsible for Tens of Thousands of Deaths

“Venezuela’s economic crisis is routinely blamed all on Venezuela,” said Jeffrey Sachs, co-author of the paper. “But it is much more than that. American sanctions are deliberately aiming to wreck Venezuela’s economy and thereby lead to regime change. It’s a fruitless, heartless, illegal, and failed policy, causing grave harm to the Venezuelan people.”

Among the results of broad economic sanctions implemented by the Trump administration since August 2017:

An estimated more than 40,000 deaths from 2017–18;

The sanctions have reduced the availability of food and medicine, and increased disease and mortality;

The August 2017 sanctions contributed to a sharp decline in oil production that caused great harm to the civilian population;

The US sanctions implemented since January, if they continue will almost certainly result in tens of thousands more avoidable deaths;

This is based on an estimated 80,000 people with HIV who have not had antiretroviral treatment since 2017, 16,000 people who need dialysis, 16,000 people with cancer, and 4 million with diabetes and hypertension (many of whom cannot obtain insulin or cardiovascular medicine);

Since the sanctions that began in January 2019, oil production has fallen by 431,000 barrels per day or 36.4 percent. This will greatly accelerate the humanitarian crisis, but the projected 67 percent decline in oil production for the year, if the sanctions continue, would cause vastly more loss of human life.

If you are an apologist for this and use it to argue against childcare services for poor black families living in Philadelphia then I kindly suggest you lie down in traffic

Right. It's US sanctions that caused the expropriation of private business leading to food shortages in a country which, due to its geography and topography, should be have an abundance of food. FFS.

No. What US sanctions in fact do is reward the regimes they sanction in Latin America, by giving them an impressively good propaganda excuse. The US has been at it for decades with regard to Cuba, while politicians keep accusing those for lifting the sanctions of rewarding the regime. Now they US is at it again, rewarding the Maduro regime.

Okay, granted, it is not literally a reward, because that is not the intent. Rather, it is something intended to hurt the regimes, but which predictably has the favorable effects of rewards. Repeatedly, US governments fail to predict the predictable consequences, and keep acting in a way that favors those regimes. If the US would just do nothing, say nothing other than "we do not interfere" (and actually refrain from interfering), and stay out of it, the propaganda campaign would just become so much harder for such regimes. Additionally, the people living there would be overall somewhat better off, as they would not have to face the bad consequences of the sanctions (much less serious than those of the regime's policies, but still, they do add some further suffering).

 

[SimpleDon]

It looks like some progressives are taking from the Venezuelan playbook. Pay for support by promising free everything and taxing the upper class to pay for it.

Somehow our progressives think taxing the rich will pay for it all. Get the pitchforks and go after those evil rich people. The flipside of the Trump fear mongering.

universal health care, forgiving all student loan debt, universal child care have been discussed and more to come.

Progressives seem to have little to say on infrastructure.

It is never free, somebody has to work to pay for it.

And we do have to work to pay entirely too much for health care. Medicare for all would lower the costs of health care to the costs in the rest of the economy. Medicare for all is single payer insurance, a single payer who has incentives to control medical costs. The private, for-profit insurance companies have no reason to control medical costs. They base the premiums they charge based on a "loss ratio" of 80 cents on the dollar. If they achieve this, it means that they are increasing the medical costs by 25% when they calculate their premiums. Their pathway to higher profits is through ever higher medical costs. It is easy for them to increase medical costs; they are the ones who pay the providers' bills.

Medicare administrative costs are about three percent in addition to the medical costs.

Also, it is highly inefficient to have many different insurance companies each selling many different insurance products paying based on different coverages. It is a rare doctors practice that doesn't employ people whose sole purpose is to verify coverage, to answer questions from insurance companies and to enquire after payments. These go away under universal health care with defined coverages and set fees.

Medicare initially struck this deal with doctors and hospitals, if you accept lower fees for your services set by us we will pay whatever you bill on submission as long as you are honest. If we go to Medicare for all, they are going to have to raise the fees that they pay, but the fees should be lower than what the insurance companies are paying now. The costs to the providers of having to deal with the many different insurance companies will be saved by Medicare for all. These costs were estimated by McKinsey to be 400 billion dollars when I dealt with them in 1998. And because Medicare will have an incentive to lower costs not to raise them like the for-profit insurance companies.

And don't feel sorry for the insurance companies. Medicare only pays 80% of the medical expenses. The patients are responsible for 20% of the costs. The for-profit insurance companies will be able to sell Medicare gap insurance to cover this 20% of the medical expenses, presumably as group coverage to employers.

No one will have to pay for student loan forgiveness. You have to understand how banking works to know why this is. And I don't mean the "banks loan out deposits" fantasy. The banks loan out money created by the Federal Reserve banking system out of thin air. If the government wants to forgive these loans they can do it with a stroke of a pen. The penstroke would eliminate the liability of the former student to pay back the loan and would eliminate the liability of the bank to pay back the loan from the Federal Reserve banking system. Everyone is happy with the bank losing out on the interest income only. The economy will have a boost in that the former student will be able to buy a home, a car, etc. instead of paying off the forgiven loan.

As for subsidizing child care, I would prefer that that they wouldn't do it. Of course, I would prefer that wages were high enough that a family could be supported with only one parent having to work. I would prefer that the gains from workers' increases in productivity went to higher wages than to higher profits. I would prefer that we weren't intentionally suppressing wages to increase profits. I would prefer that companies would provide for child care as required to hire workers in a booming economy where there is competition for workers. I would prefer an economy where people retire early rather than having to work past 65 because they don't have enough savings to retire. I would prefer to prioritize the welfare of the workers in this country over the workers in Communist China or at the minimum the workers in our neighboring countries over those in Communist China.

As for offending the already rich by expecting them to pay higher taxes for the two items on your list that would require higher taxes, infrastructure spending and free tuition in public colleges, I have little compassion for them. We have hobbled our economy to increase the incomes of the already rich. Two of the things that we have done to increase their income and their wealth is to delay infrastructure spending on newly needed projects and the maintenance of the existing infrastructure and to dramatically reduce the support for higher education to lower their taxes. The already rich have to pay taxes because they have the money.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

You know, you could have both a balanced budget and spending on infrastructure. Just make sure you have enough coming in from taxes to pay for it. It is saner that way.

No, it's not. That would be like refusing to buy a house until you have saved up enough to pay cash for it - and paying rent while you wait for your savings to accumulate.

Our future grandchildren are wealthier and living in a much richer economy than us. Why the fuck shouldn't they pay their share for the infrastructure that gave them their wealth?

Why should a poor person from 2019 pay the full cost of a road that the much richer people in 2119 will still be using? Let the future population pay their share.

There's nothing sane about donating huge capital value infrastructure free of charge to a future population who are far better able to afford it than we are.

You are mistaking 'easier for me to think about' with 'more sane'. That's OK - if you don't want to do the hard thinking, others can do it for you; But please don't try to contribute answers, if you're not prepared to understand the complexity of the questions.

You are the one who wants the infrastructure improvements, but are saying "those greedy bastard in the future will also benefit from this, so make them pay for it instead of me." Still, your ability to predict the future and determine with absolute certainty that they will benefit from the improvement you want and that they will also be richer is pretty impressive. A hundred year forecast no less. Do you perchance work for a brokerage making them fantastically wealthy through your reading of the omens?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It looks like some progressives are taking from the Venezuelan playbook. Pay for support by promising free everything and taxing the upper class to pay for it.

Somehow our progressives think taxing the rich will pay for it all. Get the pitchforks and go after those evil rich people. The flipside of the Trump fear mongering.

universal health care, forgiving all student loan debt, universal child care have been discussed and more to come.

Progressives seem to have little to say on infrastructure.

It is never free, somebody has to work to pay for it.

And we do have to work to pay entirely too much for health care. Medicare for all would lower the costs of health care to the costs in the rest of the economy. Medicare for all is single payer insurance, a single payer who has incentives to control medical costs. The private, for-profit insurance companies have no reason to control medical costs. They base the premiums they charge based on a "loss ratio" of 80 cents on the dollar. If they achieve this, it means that they are increasing the medical costs by 25% when they calculate their premiums. Their pathway to higher profits is through ever higher medical costs. It is easy for them to increase medical costs; they are the ones who pay the providers' bills.

Cut costs, your policies are cheaper, you get more customers, your profits go up. There's still an incentive to reduce costs.

Also, it is highly inefficient to have many different insurance companies each selling many different insurance products paying based on different coverages. It is a rare doctors practice that doesn't employ people whose sole purpose is to verify coverage, to answer questions from insurance companies and to enquire after payments. These go away under universal health care with defined coverages and set fees.

Wishful thinking. Verifying coverage is a small part of what such people do. Our current Medicaid system has a big issue with payments. And much of what such people do is referrals and approvals for courses of treatment--which will if anything exist even more under a Medicare-for-all system. The only way you get rid of those people is straight fee-for-service.

Medicare initially struck this deal with doctors and hospitals, if you accept lower fees for your services set by us we will pay whatever you bill on submission as long as you are honest.

Which has resulted in awful lot of abuse. Some outright fraud, some just manufacturing more billables to deal with the lower payments (for example, breaking visits into separate visits for multiple issues.)

No one will have to pay for student loan forgiveness. You have to understand how banking works to know why this is. And I don't mean the "banks loan out deposits" fantasy. The banks loan out money created by the Federal Reserve banking system out of thin air. If the government wants to forgive these loans they can do it with a stroke of a pen. The penstroke would eliminate the liability of the former student to pay back the loan and would eliminate the liability of the bank to pay back the loan from the Federal Reserve banking system. Everyone is happy with the bank losing out on the interest income only. The economy will have a boost in that the former student will be able to buy a home, a car, etc. instead of paying off the forgiven loan.

You've already been explained to how this is just fantasy. Trotting it out again doesn't make it any more true.

 

[bilby]

You know, you could have both a balanced budget and spending on infrastructure. Just make sure you have enough coming in from taxes to pay for it. It is saner that way.

No, it's not. That would be like refusing to buy a house until you have saved up enough to pay cash for it - and paying rent while you wait for your savings to accumulate.

Our future grandchildren are wealthier and living in a much richer economy than us. Why the fuck shouldn't they pay their share for the infrastructure that gave them their wealth?

Why should a poor person from 2019 pay the full cost of a road that the much richer people in 2119 will still be using? Let the future population pay their share.

There's nothing sane about donating huge capital value infrastructure free of charge to a future population who are far better able to afford it than we are.

You are mistaking 'easier for me to think about' with 'more sane'. That's OK - if you don't want to do the hard thinking, others can do it for you; But please don't try to contribute answers, if you're not prepared to understand the complexity of the questions.

You are the one who wants the infrastructure improvements, but are saying "those greedy bastard in the future will also benefit from this, so make them pay for it instead of me." Still, your ability to predict the future and determine with absolute certainty that they will benefit from the improvement you want and that they will also be richer is pretty impressive. A hundred year forecast no less. Do you perchance work for a brokerage making them fantastically wealthy through your reading of the omens?

Not 'instead of'; 'as well as'.

And most infrastructure lasts far longer than a single person's working life.

Averaged across all infrastructure spending, its a virtual certainty that most will still be useful in the future - and of course our current use of infrastructure benefits people in the future too.

You lack both imagination and education if you think our grandchildren won't benefit from infrastructure built today.

But that is not a huge surprise to me.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

It doesn't matter if my grandchildren will benefit form an infrastructure built today. What matters is that if I am asking for it to exist I should pay for it.

You exhibit the typical greed of the "left" in saying "waah, I don't wanna pay for it." You call saying "you want it you should pay for it" a "lack of imagination".

I do tend to not try to imagine ways to make other people pay for what I want.

I do pity any children you may have, because I can just imagine you handing them a bill on their 18th birthday for all that you spend on them raising them.

 

[ZiprHead]

I do pity any children you may have, because I can just imagine you handing them a bill on their 18th birthday for all that you spend on them raising them.

That sounds far more like a libertarian plan than anything else.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You are the one who wants the infrastructure improvements, but are saying "those greedy bastard in the future will also benefit from this, so make them pay for it instead of me." Still, your ability to predict the future and determine with absolute certainty that they will benefit from the improvement you want and that they will also be richer is pretty impressive. A hundred year forecast no less. Do you perchance work for a brokerage making them fantastically wealthy through your reading of the omens?

Not 'instead of'; 'as well as'.

And most infrastructure lasts far longer than a single person's working life.

Disagree. Most public infrastructure gets replaced on a shorter time scale than that. Just because the road is still there doesn't mean it's the original road.

Averaged across all infrastructure spending, its a virtual certainty that most will still be useful in the future - and of course our current use of infrastructure benefits people in the future too.

You lack both imagination and education if you think our grandchildren won't benefit from infrastructure built today.

But that is not a huge surprise to me.

Note, also, that a lot of the objection is to using bonds so everyone pays the costs of benefits that don't apply to everyone. I have repeatedly voted against bond issues that were attempts to make everyone pay for costs that were being incurred due to new development. If those builders hadn't been churning out houses we wouldn't need the spending in the first place--thus the builders should pay it, or, as was done in one big master-planned community here, a special improvement district was created to pay for the stuff so only those who got the primary benefit of the improvements paid for them.

 

[bilby]

Disagree. Most public infrastructure gets replaced on a shorter time scale than that. Just because the road is still there doesn't mean it's the original road.

The road surface is replaced frequently. But that's a trivial fraction of the road itself. The cuttings, embankments, foundations, culverts, safety fences, etc. etc. last a LOT longer than the top layer of HMC or PCC.

Averaged across all infrastructure spending, its a virtual certainty that most will still be useful in the future - and of course our current use of infrastructure benefits people in the future too.

You lack both imagination and education if you think our grandchildren won't benefit from infrastructure built today.

But that is not a huge surprise to me.

Note, also, that a lot of the objection is to using bonds so everyone pays the costs of benefits that don't apply to everyone. I have repeatedly voted against bond issues that were attempts to make everyone pay for costs that were being incurred due to new development. If those builders hadn't been churning out houses we wouldn't need the spending in the first place--thus the builders should pay it, or, as was done in one big master-planned community here, a special improvement district was created to pay for the stuff so only those who got the primary benefit of the improvements paid for them.

Infrastructure usually benefits non-users, albeit indirectly. A new road I don't drive on might well reduce traffic on the roads I do use. Or it may simply mean that goods I buy are not delivered late; Or that people I work with are not late for work; Or that people elsewhere in the state (or the country) are able to be more productive, and therefore to pay more taxes, which are then spent on things that benefit me.

The narrow view that the individual is the only important consideration is deeply wrong, and leads to very stupid conclusions, such as "the benefits don't apply to everyone". The sum of all benefits from all infrastructure certainly DOES apply to everyone. Dismantling these benefits piecemeal because for any given individual, a given infrastructure project has minimal direct benefit to him, leads to everyone missing out on the benefits of infrastructure. It's this kind of moronic "reasoning" that is the reason why so many Americans don't have access to basic healthcare, and/or go bankrupt due to what people in the developed world would experience as a minor health issue.

You people seriously need to take your heads out of your arses, and realize that there are FAR more people in the world whose wellbeing is important to you than just you yourself, or your immediate families, friends, and coworkers.

Society is a real and important concept, whether you believe in it or not.

 

[Derec]

I agree with bilby that infrastructure is important and justifies public debt. That said, overspending on infrastructure is not why Venezuela is where it is.