Gruber video on healthcare.
He starts with the difference in white and black infant mortality and blames it on healthcare access, but he ignores that a black baby born in the USA at 31 week of gestation or less is more likely to survive than a white baby at the same gestation. See table 2 page 9 here.
I love them all:
Scott Sumner's most Right Wing Positions
Once we have CBDCs, my anti-FDIC view will no longer be my most right wing opinion. And after Covid, I’m not sure my abolish the FDA view is all that right wing. Abolish the public school system? The teachers unions are already hard at work on that objective. Abolish zoning laws and allow nuclear waste dumps right next to residential housing? Heck, even Matt Yglesias seems sorta OK with that idea. Abolish the minimum wage? Some of the Nordic countries don’t even have one. Privatize fire departments? Denmark got there first.
More statistical ignorance from here.
In a 2015 YouGov survey, respondents reckoned that 32 percent of Democrats are LGBT, 29 percent are atheists or agnostics, and 39 percent belong to unions; the right figures are really 6, 9, and 11 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, they estimated that 38 percent of Republicans earn over $250,000 per year, 39 percent are over age 65, and 42 percent are evangelicals; actually, just 2 percent earn that much, 21 percent are senior citizens, and 34 percent are evangelicals.
People are low income for many reasons on one hand things like bad health, lack of valuable talent for earning money etc. and many other's but also for sloth and criminality (crime usually does not pay very well), inability to work with others etc.
I see dichotomy when I consider the contrast between the story of the good Samaritan, were the man who is poor, is only temporarily poor because he was robbed and hero really helps in a bog way in contrast to the verse below which to me implies a chronic problem but that we are called to continually tend to.
Matt 26:11 The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.
That is why it seems like amazing grace to me that Jesus says:
Luke 7:20 Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
God has a grace for you, it seems, even if most of you poverty is self inflicted.
I like to link to this to make a point that if you take the group of people who are poor for religious reasons they do not produce children whose average behavior is not similar to the average behavior of other poor people, who often bring poverty upon themselves through things like crime and pride, nevertheless it seems clear to me that we should help them and long term.
All the more amazing Gods grace.
One might point to:
2 Thess 3:10 KJV: For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.
So if a healthy man refuses to do any work he should not eat, nevertheless I think we are to help the poor even when self inflicted. Maybe in the case men we should provide work that the can an will do.
There are the deserving poor and the not so deserving poor, help them both.
Grace, grace, grace.
Links:
Why Do the Poor Commit More Crime?
Household Poverty and Nonfatal Violent Victimization, 2008-2012
Here is communist Freddie DeBoer agreeing with Libertarians; Arnold Kling, Bryan Caplan and me on school quality:
Indeed, I am on record as saying that I don’t think there’s really such a thing as school quality, and that while teacher quality may be a real and meaningful variable it is likely confounded to hell and there may be interaction effects.
There are not a significant number (more than 0.1%) of schools in the developed world that are significantly (10%) worse that the rest. We could save a lot of money if we admit that. You could use the saving to help the poorest among us if you chose.
William Barr, William Scott Dwyer, and Patrick Fagan all agree that poverty is not a cause of crime (5; ÒPart 2Ó, 1; 3). Poverty does not directly cause crime; instead, it is a factor in the cause but, independently, it is not the root source (Barr 5). During the Great Depression, poverty levels were much higher than they are today, but crime actually declined (Barr 5; Fagan 3). From the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies, income was on the rise and crime moved right along with it (Fagan 3; Dwyer Part 21). In 1990, the income level was much higher than in was in 1903, but the murder rate in 1990 was ten times higher than the murder rate in 1903, which was at 1 per 1000 inhabitants (Dwyer Part 21)
Another argument presented by Barr and Dwyer, inverts the poverty/crime relationship by stating that crime actually causes poverty. One of the premises for this argument focuses on businesses and how crime deters potential employers from establishing them (Barr 2; Dwyer ÒCrime and Poverty, Part 1Ó). One reason for this is that crime against a business reduces revenue, raising prices in impoverished neighborhoods because merchants have to make up for any losses caused by theft. These high prices also suppress the standard of living in the community, as the income in the community cannot keep pace with the rise in prices. Blacks living in high crime areas suffer from poverty because they pay higher prices for food and other goods than do whites in neighborhoods with less crime (Dwyer ÒCrime and
Poverty, Part 1Ó). Crime also decreases the likelihood that an area sees improvement; Barr describes a Òsmall contractor who tried to rehabilitate inner-city housing for low income tenants. He had to give up because drug addicts would break in, rip out his improvements, and sell them for drug moneyÓ (2).
Links:
The Cause of Crime, Anthony Holtzman Escareno
Household Poverty and Nonfatal Violent Victimization, 2008-2012A
Village With the Numbers, Not the Image, of the Poorest Place
The Democrats are proposing new taxes but Aswath Damodaran calls it: The Billionaire Tax: The Worst Tax Idea Ever?:
Voters need to have Tax incidence drilled into their heads. If we raise a tax and raise some spending, who consumes more goods and services and who consumes less. If you tax unrealized capital gains on billionaires and spend it on a child tax credit, low income families with children will probably consume more goods and services BUT because billionaires consume so small a percent of their income, they will not consume less. So who will consume less, middle-class families will. How this works through the economy is hard to see, but they surely will. That may be OK but it would probably be much more efficient to do that through other means and I think as much as is reasonable possible people paying for something should know that they are.
Progressive consumption taxes and LVT (land value taxes) taxes seem to be the best ways to raise revenue if you need to do that, BUT the bigger problem is, too much taxing the non poor and inefficiently spending on the non-poor.
Examples:
Social Security should pay $240/week to all retirees (better yet $240/week to all adult citizens instead).
Medicare should not pay for any treatments that the UK NHS does not provide and there is a lot of it, and UK NHS does not provide it because the cost is not close to worth the benefit. (Also an alternative less controversial way to cut medicare and other medical spending: This is an improved version of my idea for supporters of single payer healthcare.)
Military spending should be cut in half and spent without regard to congressional district.
Get that done and then if you still need more revenue we can talk.
Hispanic babies have about the same survival rates as white babies.
USA babies survive to 1 month as much as EU born babies.
It does not look like healthcare.
Also there are important differences between a tax and health insurance premium.
BTW According the US census, at over 90 years (see table 103) so it does not look like overall differences in life expectancy are mostly due to access to healthcare. Also the 8 America's study would give a little evidence of that also.