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Bozo_Casanova

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Everything posted by Bozo_Casanova

  1. Taos is great. Don’t tell anybody
  2. Strongly agree, esp with bolded portion, and of the many things HR/benefits teams need to to better, teaching employees how to use them and explaining why they are better is right at the top. I'd also add that in my opinion the worst thing about the ACA was forcing HDHP policies to cover routine care, i.e. checkups, vaccinations, etc. That's preciately the kind of out of pocket expense people with jobs should be paying for out of pocket, counted towards their deductible. Insurance is a risk management product, not a payment service.
  3. To continue that very apt metaphor, the Democrats messaging and platform had about as much to do with what happened in the 2024 election as fixed fortifications had to do with French success in the field from 40-42. about 10 years ago I posted that I was concerned that Democrats at the national level were falling into the strategic and organizational model of the Texas Democratic Party of 1990-2000’s. I’m very sorry to have been right about that one.
  4. Sorry @TwiceHorn I didn’t finish the thought. The relationship between revenue and spending is mediated by the effect of each on productivity. So deficit reduction is really about landing the plane- modest tax increases in the aggregate but mostly reallocating the overall tax burden off of spenders in order to sustain productivity; and simultaneous modest spending cuts in the aggregate, while reallocating the remaining spending towards productivity support and away from categories that generate long term cost.
  5. All financed with debt, no less. Sort of. It’s is true enough, but the relationship here is far more complicated than that, because revenue often rises when taxes are reduced, and revenue will often decline when outlays are decreased materially.
  6. Only stuff that helps people. Stuff that hurts people or transfers dollars from the public to favored special interests are don’t have to be either useful or effective. The Juicero guy should have gotten in with these guys- there would be a Juicero in every prison cell and public school cafeteria America.
  7. Debating whether or not to weigh into this thread, but for now- you need to factor in what your employer pays, because that’s pre-tax compensation. We can’t really have a meaningful understanding of healthcare costs or the effect of health insurance costs on income and entrepreneurship without thinking in those terms. Part of why voters in the workforce struggle with this is because they don’t understand that most of what they pay for with health insurance premiums is a combination of administrative costs and predictable, routine care. in other words- they are paying a middleman to do paperwork and pay bills they could easily covers if they simply had the money in their pocket instead of paying it to the carrier along with the carrier’s vig. That’s part of why HDHPs are so much better for the worker and so much cheaper for workers to use in almost any scenario- you get the carrier’s price, but you pay it directly with pretax dollars in your possession.
  8. No. I don’t play word games. I don’t Agree that you have been, other than your obvious support for lowering marginal income tax rates for top earners. Do you have examples of the others?
  9. I know that’s what was sold to the rubes voters, but his real offense against his party was fiscal conservatism and a serious approach to deficit reduction. Other than his massive debt funded tax policy and wars of convenience and also new entitlements and and proposed borrowing to finance the transition and stuff, sure.
  10. For grins, obviously. I don’t think of you as remotely conservative*. That said, you do have an interesting point of view on things and generally present it in good faith, and that’s why I tapped you in. *in all honesty I don’t, but I would also say that about the vast majority of voters in your coalition.
  11. Do you keep an infinity bottle?
  12. Good post- this was the point of my tongue in cheek Stephen McGee comparison upthread.
  13. George HW Bush. And they abandoned him for it.
  14. It’s hard to understand what you are saying when you’re still chewing the food you took from your kids’ mouths.
  15. Gonna be so much happening on on the first day @Anastasis set up a custom keyboard shortcut for "both sides."
  16. My new prediction is that yea he has fucked around and shall find out, verily
  17. My prediction is that Johnson loses the second round and Trump cuts him loose.
  18. He didn’t get dumber and they didn’t generally. They just retained a conservative political vocabulary even though their political tribe abandoned its conservative economic policy posture for this. So there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance there. It’s like you put Jay Gould’s brain in William Jennings Bryan’s mouth.
  19. Because you are a partisan Republican (like @Brisketexan was) you have been trained to believe that the causational relationship between fiscal stimulus via tax cuts and revenue recovery = eventual debt reduction. That’s political sleight of hand, not economic reality. Sure- and pay close attention here, because you seem to have missed a point I've been making for 22 years: we’re talking about specific, real-life events here, not hypothetical ones. Debt funded stimulus during expansion (2001, 2003, 2017) is stupid because organic growth is picking all the low hanging fruit, and stimulus is therefore inflationary. So in this scenario it’s because the cost of the debt that was incurred to stimulate the economy was higher than whatever additional revenue was generated through the stimulus. Oh, bless your heart.
  20. Gimme a buyers market and 5%, and inshallah, me with dry powder coming into the second half of the year. I bought my current home in 2009 and I want to run that play again.
  21. MAGA? There’s nothing new here. This has been orthodoxy since Reagan- debt funded fiscal stimulus via tax cuts regardless of whether it hurts or helps the economy. Volcker, Bush I and Clinton took us off that plan. Bush II put us back on it, permanently, with an unfortunate dagger 3 in 2010 on a turnover from Obama. 2017 was just running up the score in garbage time. The real irony is that these dudes have the stones to invoke Mises and Hayek when they do this shit despite being too Keynesian for Keynes.
  22. To be crystal clear about what saying- tax cuts funded by debt expansion (eg 2001, 2003, and 2017) are wealth transfers from “kids” to @Ag with kids.
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