2020 US Election

Did Joe Biden suspend his election campaign or something? Maybe he should come out guns blazing against Trump's mismanagement of the Covid-19 virus? Is he on life support somewhere? Is he going for a stealth win this fall?

Maybe he just gave up after Trump bought all the votes with his personal cheques.

  On 4/17/2020 at 8:09 AM, Gocab said:

Did Joe Biden suspend his election campaign or something? Maybe he should come out guns blazing against Trump's mismanagement of the Covid-19 virus? Is he on life support somewhere? Is he going for a stealth win this fall?

 

Maybe he just gave up after Trump bought all the votes with his personal cheques.

they're gonna switch him w/Governor Cuomo while no one is looking. 

Nice. Would be a perfect Scooby Doo moment. When Biden stands on the platform to make his vows as the new president, he raises his hand and then *poof* pulls off his mask and out comes Cuomo's head. Big grin on his face. Crowd goes wild. Cheers all over the place. In the meantime, Trump gets escorted out the back door wearing an orange jump suit.

  On 4/17/2020 at 8:09 AM, Gocab said:

Did Joe Biden suspend his election campaign or something? Maybe he should come out guns blazing against Trump's mismanagement of the Covid-19 virus? Is he on life support somewhere? Is he going for a stealth win this fall?

For whatever reason his staffers seem to like to hide him. It may be a bad idea to try to get the attention of the public during the pandemic. There is nothing he can do except complain about Trump anyway. I imagine he will come out of hiding in a month or so.

wut? did you guys forget that there's a viral pandemic going on at the moment? he's been regularly broadcasting from his house for the last few weeks, appearing on tv, doing podcasts.

  On 4/17/2020 at 5:09 AM, goDel said:

Read some research about psychological disorders being more prevalent in people at the political extremes. One of the key features in extremist psychology is rigidity and the inability to look at things from a different perspective. 

So, in others words, it's not just about what you believe, it's also - or rather more - about how you believe.

Rigidity yes, second bit maybe not. I'm far left but around a year and a half ago I would've considered myself alt-right. I was able to look at things from a different perspective, I just chose not to, until I did and it swayed me to the left. Like any common person I was basically a centrist from birth until I was 15/16 as that's what you're taught by parents and schools.

I've seen some Biden coverage lately, being interviewed on TV last night. He released a plan for the virus much earlier in the primary and then everyone asked "where's Joe Biden?". I dunno, man. He's just not doing a town hall in an overrun NYC hospital. The truth is, any other modern president, including George W. Bush would have handled it much better, but there is still some bureaucratic bullshit that makes the US unable to respond as quickly as, say, South Korea. 

The coronavirus could wipe out our entire government if you think about it, or even if you don't think about it. 

  On 4/17/2020 at 8:09 AM, Gocab said:

Did Joe Biden suspend his election campaign or something? Maybe he should come out guns blazing against Trump's mismanagement of the Covid-19 virus? Is he on life support somewhere? Is he going for a stealth win this fall?

 

Maybe he just gave up after Trump bought all the votes with his personal cheques.

any savvy campaign will know when and where and how to push their candidate. not saying Biden's campaign has been top notch, but just because he's not on CNN every day isn't a bad thing (see other notes that he's still doing smaller streaming events etc)

  On 4/17/2020 at 7:52 AM, Mesh Gear Fox said:

i honestly did not know that was a part of his platform, good on him i guess. there are plenty of people who would call him crazy for this, not just on the right. but considerably less now that he has put his weight behind it, they think if uncle joe says it's ok then it must be ok. flash back to a year ago and those same people would be calling it a socialist pipe dream.

https://joebiden.com/healthcare/

lol

trump is digging a strange grave for himself. biden has been making smart moves every week, but he doesn't really need to try anything risky to wow people. he's leading in polls, and right now florida and pennsylvannia are getting swamped in covid. it's well documented that trump froze like a coward, fool saboteur for 70 days, allowing the virus to spread, shepherding the virus to the place where it is taking tens of thousands of american lives.

it seems like he's trying to double down on his bullshit line that he didn't fuck this up by continuing to fuck this up, so people can't contrast the difference...? specifically: testing. we continue to need an extensive and sophisticated federal testing regime. forcing the states to fill that gap instead is an imbecilic idea, but the GOP's new carnival barker is going to see if he can get away with it because if he has his shit-show team try to create an adequate testing infrastructure, they would struggle and it would take forever and then people would say "why didn't you do this in february." so Epstein's tan friend just won't try and will instead bullshit the public when the question comes up, because the media, even the "liberal media," is happy to amplify his lies for ad money.

the bullshit strategy has been working incredibly well for the GOP, so it's understandable that the new, incoherent GOP leader would try to continue pushing it. maybe it's not smart to bet on the right-wing scorched-earth deception suffering it's first major loss in recent times. but over here in the states, we have over 30,000 dead, with numbers still rising.

biden has been playing things skillfully, this whole time. he's the one who cleaned up without even having a ground game or an ad game in most of the states. and now he is putting out ads about covid and ads about trump and is coalescing support. 

biden doesn't need to out-sensational trump, he doesn't want to, and he wouldn't try to. trump's whole thing is making a spectacle of himself so every news outlet in the country covers him and every citizen reads the headline like "oh god what now." meanwhile, trump has the attention and can deliver his messaging, and it only has to work on 40% of people. you're never going to see biden try to knock him from that place. 

it's nice to see obama back in the game. he's been restraining himself over the last 3.5 years, and he didn't want to weigh in before the nominee was chosen. it's not a coincidence that obama endorsed biden a couple days after bernie. he knew the bernie division in the party was a problem and it needed to resolve itself as much as possible without the appearance of anyone who could be construed as a democratic elite wielding undue influence. reportedly, word from obama camp had been that he would not endorse any candidate until the convention. but now trump was deploying some messaging that "obama won't endorse biden because he knows something," using that fox news liability-free suggestion innuendo. obama knew that messaging would continue for 3 months if he waited until the convention. 

obama's always been masterful at verbal formulations and speeches. now it is time for him to campaign with biden to supplant the failed new york conman as he is allowing thousands of deaths in a pandemic. obama will drink trump's blood.

Universal health care just means everyone has guaranteed access to health care, which his plan would provide, it doesn't mean single-payer (which very few countries implement to the degree Bernie was proposing, countries with the best health care results tend to have mixed public/private systems). 

@caze ^^^ yeah. a single payer system for the US at the federal level? that sounds like either a fairytale, or a disaster waiting to happen. it's really not as straightforward as some people seem to be suggesting. but we've been here before. lets not redo that argument. just assume i don't know what im talking about...  

  On 4/17/2020 at 2:32 PM, caze said:

Universal health care just means everyone has guaranteed access to health care, which his plan would provide, it doesn't mean single-payer (which very few countries implement to the degree Bernie was proposing, countries with the best health care results tend to have mixed public/private systems). 

True, that doesn't mean that a single payer system is worse than a mixed system per se. The US could definitely build a really excellent single payer system, if there was the political will to do it.

  On 4/17/2020 at 2:39 PM, Mesh Gear Fox said:

ah ok, well i meant public healthcare, i.e. having a system that doesn't involve private companies ripping people off as basically the only option you get. kinda like what we have here in aus.

 

so yeah returning to my point, talking about public healthcare or really anything public gets you labelled as a wingnut cus SoCiAlIsM. but 50+ years ago these were pretty mainstream "centrist" ideas.

there are only two non-commie/authoritarian countries in the world with fully public health care systems, the UK and Norway (Sweden/Denmark also have publicly health care provision, but with more private insurance). Australia has a mixed system (both in terms of provision and insurance), very different to what Bernie was proposing. More countries have single-payer systems, with either mixed or private provision set ups, but M4A was significantly more radical than any of those as well (it's very rare to attempt to ban virtually all private insurance, rare and also a terrible idea). fully public health care is a recipe for disaster, it's very expensive, tends to be badly managed and has poorer outcomes than mixed systems, which is probably why 'centrists' are no longer keen on the idea, if something has proven to be a bad idea, don't do it!

Excuse me, but how would M4A be more expensive than the system they have right now?

  On 4/17/2020 at 3:03 PM, darreichungsform said:

Excuse me, but how would M4A be more expensive than the system they have right now?

Because it would cost tens of trillions of taxpayer dollars over the next decade. Sander's claims these projections will be offset by reductions in costs thanks to simplifying the system (among other things), but there's not much evidence for his claims, costs tend to go up under government control, not down. It's also possible to try and bring insurance costs down without bringing in single payer, there are lots of anti-competitive laws in place around insurance for example, but insurance only accounts for a minority of the cost anyway. The biggest cost is the cost of running hospitals, and that's not going to change much, after that it's the price of drugs (which can also be tackled without going single-payer). It might be possible to bring in single payer to the US at some point, you need to tackle the ridiculous costs (most of which have nothing to do with private insurance companies) first though.

  On 4/17/2020 at 3:20 PM, caze said:

costs tend to go up under government control, not down

Sources?

  On 4/17/2020 at 3:20 PM, caze said:

Because it would cost tens of trillions of taxpayer dollars over the next decade. Sander's claims these projections will be offset by reductions in costs thanks to simplifying the system (among other things), but there's not much evidence for his claims, costs tend to go up under government control, not down. It's also possible to try and bring insurance costs down without bringing in single payer, there are lots of anti-competitive laws in place around insurance for example, but insurance only accounts for a minority of the cost anyway. The biggest cost is the cost of running hospitals, and that's not going to change much, after that it's the price of drugs (which can also be tackled without going single-payer). It might be possible to bring in single payer to the US at some point, you need to tackle the ridiculous costs (most of which have nothing to do with private insurance companies) first though.

Expand  

I think the US is economically strong enough and competent enough to pull it off either way, through a mixed or through a single payer system. The fact that a single payer system doesn't work well in poor, authoritarian countries with lots of political and economic disruptions is far from being an indicator that it wouldn't work in the US.

22 studies agree: 'Medicare for All' saves money

warren's m4a plan cited total healthcare costs for 10 years around 50 trillion. estimated overall cost reduction by going to m4a would be multiple trillions over the same period.

  On 4/17/2020 at 3:33 PM, very honest said:

22 studies agree: 'Medicare for All' saves money

 

warren's m4a plan cited total healthcare costs for 10 years around 50 trillion. estimated overall cost reduction by going to m4a would be multiple trillions over the same period.

like I pointed out though, many of these savings have nothing to do with the single payer part of the system, and many are also included in Biden's plan (which doesn't cost anywhere near as much). cutting down on insurance administration costs is only a drop in the bucket of the overall cost of his plan, and can be tackled in other ways - like increasing competition in the private insurance market, helping it consolidate and become more efficient and cheaper. the projections for the cost of m4a are likely very conservative too, these things tend to end up costing several times more than expected.

  On 4/17/2020 at 3:24 PM, rhmilo said:

Sources?

the entire history of the modern world. this isn't entirely the government's fault, it's largely a natural consequence of 'stuff' getting cheaper to manufacture, while people get more expensive to pay, thanks to rising living standards and other things. the private sector is just more agile when it comes to dealing with these problems than governments (as long as they're not trapped into some corrupt monopoly situation themselves), and governments tend to revel in increasing the size of their bureaucracy, so I'm sceptical about their claims on reducing inefficiencies in the private sector, just as likely they'll replace them with their own versions.

  On 4/17/2020 at 3:44 PM, Mesh Gear Fox said:

right but you're getting ahead of yourself and getting off track. all i said was something closer to what australia has would be good, but is considered too extreme for most centrists and moderates. surely you get the gist of what i'm saying with the overton window being moved and stuff right?

but it's clearly not considered too extreme by centrists/moderates, because Biden's plan would be much closer to what Australia currently has. the Overton window has moved significantly to the left within the democratic party in the last 20 years.

  On 4/17/2020 at 3:53 PM, caze said:

the private sector is just more agile when it comes to dealing with these problems than governments (as long as they're not trapped into some corrupt monopoly situation themselves), and governments tend to revel in increasing the size of their bureaucracy

That's an entirely ideological assumption.

By the way, I love bureaucracy. It means things are planned out and thought through and not just left to chance and the "competence" of people

  On 4/17/2020 at 4:06 PM, darreichungsform said:

By the way, I love bureaucracy. It means things are planned out and thought through and not just left to chance and the "competence" of people

Sounds like an entirely ideological assumption to me.

Seems we both are entirely ideological fucktards then