Hilarious GW, really.
The NCPA can be a communist outfit and it wouldn't matter. They didn't even do the research, they're just reporting on it. I've seen multiple studies done in different years over the past decade, they've all said the same thing. We spank the shit out of everyone else. You should really get over this habit of looking at the medium first, and data second. Considering D.C. is run by a bunch of verifiably corrupt, habitual liars, you shouldn't be so distrusting of people that distrust them anyway.
Yes, your post about our cancer survival rates are all great, but that does little to show what our healthcare system is like. Our health care research and technology is top notch. There is no doubt about it. But there is something very troubling about our country/government that allows its citizens to go poor when their health goes poor.
There's something very wrong with a country/government that forces others to pay for the problems of individuals. These problems are often self caused as well. You have no right to spend a few hundred thousand dollars of someone elses money, whether you earned your ailment or not. Taxation is not charity.
As to your understanding of economics, terribly surprising that you don't know the drawbacks of credit, really...
The great depression was started by the federal reserve tightening the money supply. What does that mean? They thought there was too much credit, the debt level in the country was massive. So they started restricting it. All of a sudden, billions of dollars, trillions in todays values, vanished overnight when the margin calls hit on the dropping stocks. There wouldn't have been any margin calls, no failed banks, no lost empires, if everyone had actually owned the property they had. Credit amplifies the business cycle. It takes that natural, and unavoidable boom and bust cycle that comes with a free market, and ramps up the growth. What goes up, comes back down. What should be a slowdown in growth as saturated markets lose the weaker comepitors, becomes a 40% drop in gdp.
Too much credit is financial suicide, too little stifles growth by denying those worthy candidates of an investment. We have way too much debt right now, it's more than enough to kickstart a depression to make the last one look like a cake walk.
Hmmmm, to be honest I looked at the data, thought "I don't really have time to look too hard at it, I'll trust Gods own peer review system to keep me safe", and that was that. I was always prepared to be wrong, there is no reason why cancer care in the US couldn't give better results, the US governments "you scratch my back- I'll scratch yours" relationship with big pharma means they could have slipped more developmental drugs through more quickly.
That actually works backwards. The only thing saving the medical research not done in the US is the fucking FDA. It's prohibitively expensive to get things through the process, new drugs occasionally hit European markets years in advance due to minor snags in the beaurocracy. We're the best because we spend so much, not because of any back scratching by uncle. In this country, a 60 year old can blow several hundred grand on sustained cancer treatments over several years time. In most, they'll give you pain killers and tell you to go home after the first round.
psychoak, whats your opinion of the NCPA? Fair and unbiased? Do you know anything about them?
I write organizations off when they post misleading information. I write research off only when it's in question. The research wasn't done by them, their validity as an organization is fairly irrelevant. All of those graphs are labeled with source information. If you find the numbers questionable, it's easy enough to do the fact checking and hunt those sources down. I've done this previously, on multiple occasions, and those numbers are similar to the last time I went through this, so I'm not worried about them being faulty.
I do call into question the sanity of people that hold a bias against classical liberalism though. It can't possibly be more obvious than it already is, our respective governments are abusively powerful and still growing even while they collapse the world economy. They're sticking their nose into every aspect of life, and idiots on the social left and economic right just sit there acting like retards over bullshit like gay marriage or stem cell research instead of figuring out they'd be in agreement if they just had the brains God gave a gnat.
