What you need to factor in as well is that the military budget doesn’t include the actual costs of waging wars. We permanently occupy ourselves in the middle east and it costs trillions of dollars; the iraq war so far has cost like 1.5 trillion. 1.5 trillion flushed down the toilet. Know what you could’ve done w/1.5…

It is the difference in the type of spending that is important. When you look at your personal finances you don’t treat the money you allocate for rent the same as the money you allocate for going out to eat. The principal is the same here. Medicare is treated as the rent payment because it has to happen and the…

But you have to distinguish between income that has to go toward a specific item and income that doesn’t. If you don’t it puts a skewing lens over the data and allows it to be misconstrued and give the wrong impression of taxes and spending.

Items who’s budget is directly associated with a specific tax are harder to change, because money from that source goes directly into that budget. Nobody really has control over it.

The graph is misleading. Social Security and Medicare have a separate tax that goes only toward those items. Discretionary spending is what is really important when it comes to government budgets. Here is the graph for that.

Ah, but read the company’s page describing that. They also say it’s a great option as your only insurance when you can’t afford anything better! Which is mainly how they were used.

I work for a company with thousands of workers in Canada, UK, New Zealand, Australia among others, and in almost a decade they’ve never said they needed private care or a need to come to the US for healthcare. Most of them genuinely feel bad for us and our shitty system...

These plans are the equivalent to the crappy predatory lending mortgages that nearly killed the economy.

Damn straight. People suck. Now leave me the hell alone. That’s right, piss right off! Goan git!

There’s no (good) excuse to be lonely. I live by myself. I am a bachelor. I would say a confirmed bachelor, but I know the connotation associated with that term and it’s nothing like that. Sometimes people will ask “don’t you get lonely?”, well, actually no. I’m not housebound, nor am I Agoraphobic. I get out and do…

1. I don’t believe that you have sufficient cash and investments on hand to cover the total cost I’m talking about, which is a very common scenario pre-ACA, which is roughly equivalent to paying for a nice house in cash. You do realize that out of pocket maximums don’t fully limit what you can be charged out of…

The problem is that getting adequate healthcare in the US is not at all the same thing as saving up to buy a new car.

When my dad slowly died an agonizing death to fast-moving cancer and my parents lost the tiny amount of shit they had managed to accumulate with their minimum wage jobs because he made the “choice” to take the only job he could thanks to the Reds tanking the economy in ‘08 and made the “choice” to pay their rent…

Typical conservative troll. Outlandish talking point gets (rightly and brilliantly) destroyed and the response is: “Durr... Obama said something like this before I think.”

I hear you — I live on a mountain that’s just under the landing pattern for a mid-size city airport. A Southwest 737 on descent at 1000' AGL is almost imperceptible. Meanwhile, a Cessna 172 at cruise can be deafening, depending on the pilot’s RPM setting.

Remember when gas/oil prices went up really high and flight prices skyrocketed because of it? And they crammed more seats on planes and charged us heavy fees for bags? Then fuel/oil prices dropped drastically and the flight prices never went down and fees never went away? Fuck everything about the airlines.

Indeed, the ‘everyone a contractor’ economy will only work when we have enough fundamental rights (particularly healthcare) to make such low paying/erratic work compatible with a decent standard of living. Otherwise it’s hello third world.