Clinton "reason" for the nation going right?

[evilsoup]

I think Surlethe means the shift rightwards began as a reaction to the Civil Rights Act, or that the Act was the pinnacle of left-wing/liberalism in the US.

[Surlethe]

Yes to evilsoup, no to Rogue. It, and the civil rights movement in general, triggered the white backlash.

[Simon_Jester]

I'd say there was a lot of other things.

The counterculture in general created a huge backlash among people who saw the progress America had been making steadily since the end of the Depression as having been hijacked. They and their parents had sweated, fought a big war against fascism and a host of small ones, stared eyeball-to-eyeball with the Russians, et cetera... and now their kids were cavorting naked, reveling to music that brought out the worst qualities in the human mind, and smoking a small mountain of pot. Or such was the perception. That was part of the backlash too.

That was tied into the Vietnam war- where a big part of the young generation going into the war had a strong sense that they were being betrayed by The Man, drafted to bleed for something totally unnecessary, but the older one had the opposite sense: that these kids were punks who didn't grasp the idea of public service and the need for the citizen-soldier.

So even for people on the right who didn't much care about civil rights issues, there was a lot to dislike about the direction the country was going in the 1960s and 1970s. Taxes honestly were high and a rapidly increasing share of them was going to the poor, the cultural mores were shifting away from anything social conservatives could trust, and the nation's foreign policy was getting shaken up by waves of pacifism and rejection of the theories of containment and rollback.

Civil rights was only part of the picture.

[evilsoup]

Okay, but the youth of the 1960s are now the ones in charge of the establishment. Why did they lose their ideals and shift to the right? Or is it actually the case the the hippies (etc.) were only ever a tiny percentage of the youth population, the majority of soldiers in the Vietnam war were willing to go, and the youth of the time were just as reactionary as their parents? That's not rhetorical, I genuinely don't know.

[Darth Wong]

Oh right, I forgot: presidents are supposed to appoint people they know from business to do that sort of thing, like Kenneth Lay.

Yes, yes they are. Chain of command and all that. The appointees don't have to be businessmen, however; they can be whoever the President appoints and preferably the Senate confirms. Your example of Kenneth Lay of Enron notoriety, and his links to the Clinton White House, shows that Billy-boy was a corrupt politician (redundancy). But that's irrelevant, as Lay WAS NOT APPOINTED OR CONFIRMED TO ANY POLITICAL OFFICE. Nor was The Witch. If you want a more au courant example of the argument you made, look no farther than Obama's appointment of Jeff Immelt of GE as his top economic advisor. GE paid NO U.S. taxes last year. Yeah.

I love your use of "Oh yeah? Democrats bad too" talking points, as if that American back-ande-forth crap has any bearing whatsoever on the validity of your claim that Hillary was an improper choice to head up a commission on something. There is nothing more improper or immoral about picking Hillary than picking some dude he happened to know in college or through business networking (which happens all the time), and you know it.

Precisely what do you think "efficiency" means? Hint: money that goes directly toward the accomplishment of your primary objective is not waste, even if that objective happens to be law enforcement.

I am not arguing that that inefficiency is unnecessary. The purpose of many government functions, such as law enforcement, is to maintain a status quo. The purpose of armed forces is also to maintain the status quo, i.e. continued existence of the state or nation being protected. While vital, those functions maintain the welfare of the citizens of a state or nation. They do not contribute to its advancement. I submit that medicine and health care, in general, is NOT a status quo industry or static entity.

You totally ignored the question. Precisely what do you think "efficiency" means? It's an English word, and I wonder if you know what it means. Efficiency can be expressed in equation form; it's not complicated.

The goal of medicine, from the ambulance driver to the Glaxo research scientist, is to extend human life and find better ways to heal wounds. That goal requires innovation and creativity, two words not commonly associated with government functions.

Generic anti-government rhetoric. Not a shred of evidence provided on your end. Ironic that you're typing this on the Internet, which was originally a government project.

Medicine is also a competitive business, which forces hospitals and research companies to make the best possible use of their resources...to operate efficiently. Canadian drugs are cheaper than those in the US because CANADIAN DOCTORS AND RESEARCHERS DIDN'T INVENT THEM...they're making or licensing cheaper copies of drugs made elsewhere including in the U.S. Or, as in Canada, the government puts a cap on the amount insurance will pay for drugs which forces drug companies to recoup costs and make some profit by shifting their R&D and marketing expenses to, oh, places like the US!

They're still making a profit, moron. If they weren't, then they wouldn't sell to the Canadian market at all. In fact, two of the reasons for lower pharma prices in Canada is that the US pharma companies sell in bulk to these big government health care providers, and that they are at far less risk of massive liability lawsuit losses because our legal system doesn't have a lottery mentality for lawsuits. Moreover, you are acting as if pharmaceutical companies = health care. What about procedural research? That is public domain and cannot be patented, so guess what: nobody has a financial incentive to fund it. That's why procedural research is done in hospitals, with plenty of government money.

Not only that, but these drug companies you're so fond of are spending more money on marketing than on R&D in the US, and what money they do spend on R&D is heavily government-subsidized, even though they keep all the patent profits for themselves afterwards. Moreover, because they are market driven, they focus their research on what will generate the most profit, not necessarily produce the most public benefit. That's why they pour all their money into medications for erectile dysfunction and high blood pressure, because old people have bigger bank accounts than young people.

Which drives up OUR health care costs. Copying other peoples' drugs and medical procedures while inventing few of your own sure sounds efficient, and so does "we'll pay this price for your drugs or you don't do business in Canada!" so points for you. And if you want an efficient health care system that is ten years behind your closest neighbor, hey that's a good way to maintain a status quo. So in Canada, your health care system makes complete sense. Not so much for us here in AFY - we typically want better stuff all the time, not the status quo, makes government-run health care unsuited for OUR SYSTEM.

We do NOT "copy other peoples' drugs", you lying sack of shit. Canada has the same patent laws as anybody else. Lipitor in Canada is sold by the same company that sells it in the US, and they still profit handsomely from it; why the fuck would they sell it if they were taking a loss on the whole market and had to recoup that loss elsewhere, moron? Have you ever run any kind of business? We only "copy" drugs when the patent runs out, which is the exact same thing generic drug companies do in the US. Also, see above about medical procedures; they are not patented, and anyone can use them. That's why government is necessary to fund that kind of research.

I'll accept that Canadian administrative overhead is lower than ours. Your total population is also about half that of the number of people administered by United Healthcare in the US. I just took a gander at UHC's 2010 annual report, which shows operating activities as about 9% of revenues. However, I have yet to see a Canadian health care operating statement that accounts for operations/overhead like a US insurance company's financial statement. I'm not sure I'm doing an apples to apples comparison.

The New England Journal of Medicine published a report on the relative efficiencies of the two systems. Give it up; your system is far less efficient.

I'd expect US admin costs to be higher (profit motive, multiple plans, 50 state plans and insurance commissions to contend with vs. 10 provinces and 3 territories in Canada), but not five times higher.

And this arbitrary "not five times higher" statement is based on what, exactly? Also keep in mind that profit counts as inefficiency, if your goal is providing health care. You see, that's the problem: the primary goal of US health care providers is not actually to provide health care. It's to generate profit.

Also, I don't consider overhead as waste; our HIPAA and other regulations, along with state requirements, generate more paperwork or electronwork that must be done. There are other measures of efficiency besides overhead, such as speed of service and availability of treatment that we haven't touched on, but we're way off the Clinton OT so I'll say no more.

First you say that the entire law enforcement system is waste, then you say that you don't consider paperwork to be waste? Logical consistency is not your bag, is it?

The problem is, as I've already said, that you clearly do not understand what "efficiency" means.

[Simon_Jester]

Okay, but the youth of the 1960s are now the ones in charge of the establishment. Why did they lose their ideals and shift to the right? Or is it actually the case the the hippies (etc.) were only ever a tiny percentage of the youth population, the majority of soldiers in the Vietnam war were willing to go, and the youth of the time were just as reactionary as their parents? That's not rhetorical, I genuinely don't know.

As the '70s rolled past, the political agenda of the '60s movements wound up being laughed off as 'impractical idealism' by many; I suspect your typical 60 to 65-year old voter (the ones who were in their teens and early 20s in the mid-1960s) would remember it that way today.

Moreover, the social ideals of the movement started to turn sour. Civil rights gave way to race riots. The soldiers coming home from Vietnam saw the antiwar movement as directed against them personally and rejected it. The economy crapped out, we had the first big round of oil shortages, the cultural mores took a turn away from the mystical-reformist and towards the self-indulgent, and so on.

I suspect that on average, the people who were politically active in the '60s youth movements are still on the left (see Samuel W. Brown, the guy who's quoted at the top of the page this week), while the people who stayed home and watched Woodstock through the wrong end of the binoculars are most likely to have wound up in the Tea Party, with everyone else in between. About all that's changed is that the conservatives have become more self-confident, while the left has become less inclined to radical changes with age and with long slogs through difficult political terrain.

Another point- while the backlash against the Civil Rights Act may have in some respects kickstarted the right wing backlash fifty years ago, the average Tea Party member is not a segregationist. The theme the far right has played so successfully in the past few decades is a version of anarcho-libertarianism with a side order of corporatism, not so much reaction to civil rights, where the left won its battles rather effectively.

Smoldering racism is a lot less likely to get Michelle Bachmann the Republican nomination than smoldering resentment at having to pay taxes. We're seeing the very outcome that libertarians of the 1960s and 1970s decried, in that the people have learned they can vote themselves bread and circuses. The irony is that instead of having them administered by public officials as in Rome, they seem to prefer to vote that the funds be given out to large corporations, so long as they get their narrow slice of the pie for the aforementioned bread and circuses.

[Ariphaos]

I'll accept that Canadian administrative overhead is lower than ours. Your total population is also about half that of the number of people administered by United Healthcare in the US. I just took a gander at UHC's 2010 annual report, which shows operating activities as about 9% of revenues.

And US Government provided healthcare has an overhead of 3%, and Canada was at 1.3 percent. Considering that the efficiency of health care is largely determined by the number of those covered, you have solidly proven that governments can easily be an order of magnitude more efficient than private companies.

[Zinegata]

One thing to keep in mind however, is that America has historically never had a "big government" for this long in its history. For the most part, America had a pretty limited Federal government (or even State Government) since its independence.

The only times when the Federal government increased massively in size and spending before 1945 was whenever there was a war on (particularly the Civil War and the First World War), and the Federal government immediately returned to its anemic levels of spending and governance once the war was over. Heck, income tax was instituted during the Civil War, but was virtually abolished again at its end.

That all changed after '45. For the first time the Federal government didn't once again "demobilize" into almost nothing, largely because of the Cold War. That may be also be why we're also seeing a big push against taxes since the end of the Cold War; it may not be a "rebellion" against liberalism per se, but just people pushing back to the "way things were", for good or ill.

[PainRack]

So, why was the momentum lost? Sinclair, Roosevelt, the swing towards liberalism and government intervention was well under way. Social Security and Medicare were sacrosanct projects, until the Tea Party came about.

Was the failure of the Great Society really that bad?

[BrooklynRedLeg]

Oh yeah the poor pharmas HAVE to pass the costs onto US consumers.


Thats why they post record profits.

Doubly so since government grants pay for a large portion of drug development. In turn, the Pharmaceutical industry gets to double dip their customer base by charging for 'fair use' a product they mostly didn't have to pay to develop. Now, as I understand it, a number of them have been able to buy back their limited patents to keep them from expiring, thereby preventing generic versions to be put in the marketplace.

[Simon_Jester]

So, why was the momentum lost? Sinclair, Roosevelt, the swing towards liberalism and government intervention was well under way. Social Security and Medicare were sacrosanct projects, until the Tea Party came about.

Was the failure of the Great Society really that bad?

Ultimately, I think it was the reaction against the '60s- when the average American finally saw something on the left they might rationally not want to join, because the hippie lifestyle was not for the average American and never was, even if it was temporarily popular youth culture.

When people started thinking of that as the 'logical extreme' of the American left, it triggered a ricochet towards the right. Which was further helped along by the failure of technocratic big government to address the economic slump of the 1970s, and by the wave of self-congratulatory backslapping about how great capitalism was and how America was now due to preside over the 'end of history' after the end of the Cold War.

[BrooklynRedLeg]

So, why was the momentum lost? Sinclair, Roosevelt, the swing towards liberalism and government intervention was well under way. Social Security and Medicare were sacrosanct projects, until the Tea Party came about.

Was the failure of the Great Society really that bad?

Well, which Tea Party in particular? The original Tea Party movement (which still accounts for roughly 50% of the self-professed Tea Partiers) has far more in common with The New Left from the 60s than people care to realize. People forget that there is a core to the Tea Party movement that is made up of the Anti-War Right (sometimes called The Old Right). This is especially true whenever self-proclaimed "Tea Party" invader twats like Michelle Bachmann start bringing social conservative issues to the table that no one in their right mind would agree to letting the government dictate.

[Simon_Jester]

So, why was the momentum lost? Sinclair, Roosevelt, the swing towards liberalism and government intervention was well under way. Social Security and Medicare were sacrosanct projects, until the Tea Party came about.

Was the failure of the Great Society really that bad?

Well, which Tea Party in particular? The original Tea Party movement (which still accounts for roughly 50% of the self-professed Tea Partiers) has far more in common with The New Left from the 60s than people care to realize. People forget that there is a core to the Tea Party movement that is made up of the Anti-War Right (sometimes called The Old Right). This is especially true whenever self-proclaimed "Tea Party" invader twats like Michelle Bachmann start bringing social conservative issues to the table that no one in their right mind would agree to letting the government dictate.

Yes. You've been out-louded.

The problem is that when you speak for small government and don't have a lot of money, you're in terrible danger of being co-opted, assimilated, absorbed and overtaken by people who speak for small government and do have a lot of money. They will act as your cobelligerents when it's convenient, and overpower you when it's not.

In any case, the small-government right has been around for a long time; it's just gained more rhetorical traction with the ballooning deficit of the Bush years, now continuing to balloon in the Obama years. Couple that with the fact that they are now the last best hope for the powerful interests which have backed the Republican party for the last 20-30 years, the only element within the party that still has some degree of cultural dynamism and appeal to people outside the core ranks of the movement*. Suddenly, the Tea Party (and its fake substitutes) become a lot more prominent than ever before. No big surprise there.

*"Government is cheating you" is a form of appeal; "you are godless heathens" or "we should invade Iran" are not. Not these days.