I would like neither.
I want a pony.
Quarantine and incinerate. Problem solved.
, or survive the plague without anyone educated enough to look for a cure.
We’ll have a treatment, rich people don’t want to die. It’ll just cost money.
If you want to go live in the woods, get off mah intarnet!
I bet there’s poor people in the woods too. They’ll just try to steal my canned chili.
Healthcare. A healhtier person can afford to work while going to school, and will have a better life thereafter having the security. Opening your own business also would be fantastic as you could actually afford health care instead of going without.
Maybe you should flesh out your theory a little beyond Too Many Penguins, and then criticize others for being glib.
He didn’t lodge a general complaint against illegal immigration, he went straight for the part that’s guaranteed in the Reconstruction Amendments.
You need to lay this out for me because this is not making any sense at all. I’ve read and reread the statement you quoted and don’t see how what he said is a constitutional issue, unless you are trying to imply that he’s advocating children of illegal immigrants born in the US shouldn’t have these theoretical benefits. If that’s the case, I think you are way off base in your interpretation of his statement. You’re making assumptions about what he meant that are not supported by his words.
I had a workplace survey today. I also requested a Pony.
I’d like to keep my salary, kthx
Cut my taxes, I’ll find ways to pay for the other shit myself.
If I had to chose…it’d be a tough call. On a personal level, obviously, healthcare. I’m out of college and I don’t have kids.
However on a national level both have secondary effects that are crucial beyond the obvious. Nationally funded healthcare would lift a huge burden from business. Employee insurance costs crazy fucktons and is only going up. It would also lower costs for just about everything because if all the health providers are negotating as a group they’ll get the prices they want. Advertising would be much less of an expense for medical product folks as they would be working through government systems rather than trying to sell broad swaths of individuals and institutions. That said, you’d need seriously good checks in place otherwise we end up with a medical-industrial complex that will probably get just as fucked up and ridiculous as the military-industrial complex (which is still not nearly as bad as healthcare is as it’s currently being handled). You also get people out of emergency rooms for colds and into medical clinics which will again reduce costs and debt in a big way.
Education, on the other hand, feeds all fields and keeps our workforce worth that little bit extra on the global stage. We need to keep our technological edge if we can’t claim that much of an industrial one. We need as many smart people as we can pump out to compete with other countries that are currently cleaning our clocks. Advances in healthcare, maybe better models for government services and just basic science will help drive down healthcare costs and improve services well down the road. Solutions to all our big problems are far more likely to come out of an educated public than not. It will also help level the economic playing field that’s currently tilted further than it’s been since the 20’s. If we’re going to be the egalitarian America we really need to be - this is the direction we need to go.
So, I’m torn.
In the end I guess healthcare. Yes, it serves my immediate concerns best but if we can lower those costs we’ll simulate the economy. A stimulated economy means more tax revenue. More tax revenue will create a window to offer free education among other things. That and fucking castrate the neocons. Get us out of Iraq. Make nice with the world. Reduce our currently wasteful military spending.
I would rather have both, but failing that I will take health care.
Universal health care, absolutely. We already have free education through high school… the problem is, it sucks so badly that we have to teach college freshmen remedial writing and math. As it is, you’ve already got people complaining that their four years at college don’t prepare them for any real job. Sending ever-increasing numbers of poorly-educated high school students to college would only further water down the value of a college degree.
So add universal health care and fix the free education system that’s already in place. Or maybe we could compromise: free medical school for everyone!
Attention! The above = win.
Who says its not in the interests of the wealthy to pay for these things? I’d happily pay more tax if it meant that people were healthier and more educated. Poor, sick people are more likely to rob my house or mug me in the streets.
Plus, I know I’m pretty lucky to have the income I do. I had parents that cared about my education and my local school was great. That’s just sheer luck, and I’m big enough to admit that. I can do without a few luxury goods if it means people at the bottom of the heap learn to read and write and don’t have to worry about getting sick.
And from an economic POV, I prefer to live in a country with a healthy and educated workforce, because its better for the economy. People with better jobs buy more games :D.
That’s how it worked for my grandfather in Germany at the turn of the previous century.
His top five score on the national graduation test meant that he was allowed to attend any university for as long as he wanted to go. He decided to become a dentist, and actually had to complete his MD program first, and then specialize in dentistry.
Haha. You should try talking to college graduates. In fact, the percentage of college graduates among voters is probably pretty high. Has it really helped?
[URL=“Voter turnout - Wikipedia”]Turns out yes.
Depending, I guess, on whether or not you actually care whether people are engaged with their society and capable of evaluating their own self-interest.
That would be the latter half of his either-or proposition. Universal healthcare over here, 14th Amendment over here, never the twain shall meet.
But that argument isn’t exactly A to B to C*, it requires a lot of assumptions about what “universal healthcare” precisely means, the economics of illegal Penguin-ation, as well as a blanket assertion that the illegal Penguin problem is completely intractable without applying the Dubya doctrine to certain Constitutional guarantees. Which gets us right back to the argument I disagreed with originally.
If you want to argue intent, I don’t care whether he desires X or is simply stating as a fact that X is necessary to reach desirable outcome Y. That might provide the foundation for yet another cliched morality discussion between Jack McCoy and Fred Thompson at the end of Law & Order, but I don’t think it has a practical application here.
Voter turnout is automatically a good thing? Just showing up doesn’t show that education has led to better voting practices…just MORE voting practices.