Justice Clarence Thomas has secretly accepted luxury trips from a major Republican donors

but but but it's ok to take gifts from people who are going to appear in court before you right? That's just gifts. I mean, don't people always pay for each other's expensive kid's education? @StupidMoniker

 

Who the buyer is matters in every industry. If someone needs my widgets right now or their deal to produce a million gadgets will fall through, they are highly incentivized to take whatever price I am willing to sell for. If another buyer has long term plans and can source widgets any time down the road, or even develop his own supply, then he has less incentive to accept my offer. - and the incentives of the buyer and seller are severely misaligned , this and the fact that people are in general, bad at predicting inherently unpredictable risks has resulted in an industry thad basically can't exist without regulations.[/quote]
The incentives of buyer and seller are always misaligned. The buyer wants to get more while spending less. The seller the opposite. Same as it ever was. An employer wants to pay less money and have an employee that works harder for more hours. An employee wants to get more money and work less hours doing something easy.

Which is why most people don't have pet insurance.

The issue with health insurance is that it is a terrible idea as applied. The whole point of insurance, generally, is to spread the risk of rare but catastrophic events (like you business burning down, your ship sinking, your car being damaged in a collision, etc.). The biggest problem with health insurance is that eventually most people end up needing it. It would be like homeowners insurance if 80+% of homes burned down. Part of that is mitigated by Medicare, because a lot of the people end up getting sick when they are over 65. What we should have is a two tier system of government provided health insurance (at the state level) and either higher tier private insurance or just the ability to upgrade care for a cost at point of sale.

So not only do you not have any instances of me quoting John Galt, you have decided to throw in an unfounded accusation that I am a Neo-Nazi as well. That's one way to go when asked for evidence.

Moral hazard is hardly unique to health insurance economics. In fact, I would say it has greater application in government.

I keep telling you people, I don't really have much in the way of problems. My life is pretty great. I enjoy discussing political topics, but I'm going to be fine no matter who is elected.

Ayn was rightly incensed that not only was she forced to pay into a system that she didn't support, she also didn't get the benefit of doing so she was promised.

I would say it looks worse than the vacations, but better than the house.

 

It looks really bad - and definitely raises questions on whether Thomas can be trusted given his lack of disclosures. I am not sure he may be in tax trouble now if those gifts for education were not reported to the IRS - they may not even be considered gift if there was a quid pro quo which there appear to be given the timing of the gifts and the fact the gift giver had business before the court. Republicans need to address other than saying liberals are on a smear campaign. They are only digging themselves in deeper here as protecting a potential corrupt justice.


In terms of insurance - yeah insurance just isn't widgets. Insurance by its very nature works by pooling different levels of risk together to create savings for the riskiest people while providing safety to the risk adverse. If you break that, than no one wins. If you only create pools of the lowest risk individuals, the insurance company doesn't have a large enough pool to stay solvent long term in case of a crisis. Additionally, hospitals and other systems will simply jack up costs on the low risk people to cover the costs of the people who they lose money on without insurance. You see, this is the reason insurance isn't widgets - the less people covered, the higher the premiums go because hospitals and drug companies get less money. Uninsured people don't pay their bills. They don't have the money. So the hospital still has to treat them, and it's more expensive since those people can't afford preventive care - so they come to the ER when it's an emergency - because a hospital can not let someone die even if they don't have insurance. That's high cost care.

Who pays for that care? You guessed it - the insured do. This is why insurance doesn't work like widgets. With widgets, the more people who want a widget and try to get it, the price goes up. Scarcity. But the opposite is true with insurance. Insurance isn't a thing - it's not an item that has a limited supply. But the more people insured, the more money that gets paid out to hospitals, the less losses they take, and the less money they need to recup from insurance companies - thus lower premiums for everyone.

This is why the ACA helped keep premiums lower than they otherwise would be. preventive care lowers premiums. Insurance is a group purchase, not an individual one. It's not a limited product. It doesn't fit the model you are trying to force upon it. It's far more complex than you understand it to be.

 

No it does not.

If 100 people buy your 1 year-lasting widgets and 75 die the next year - it literally does not matter at all to you. The widget market continues. The widgets you sold are unaffected. You find new customers. Great.

If 100 people buy your 1 year life insurance policy and 75 die the next year, you are out of business and the policyholders don't get paid, and the remaining policyholders also don't get what they paid for, because you, the insurer, are bankrupt. The market has collapsed. Because you chose the wrong buyers, you absolute idiot.


Having smartphones does not change this! At all! You neo confederate galt quoting moron! It doesn't!

 

It seems like the court is circling the wagons.

In the alternative, you could make it so you don't have to treat people that show up and can't pay or don't have insurance. Or you could create a two tier system where there is taxpayer funded care for anyone who shows up and then private care for those who pay.

That isn't just the nature of health insurance, it is a result of laws and regulations, including the requirement that everyone who shows up to the emergency room gets treated.

Life insurance is based on actuarial tables. The pricing is different based on risk factors. If 100 people buy my 1 year policy and I have taken into account that 75 of them were likely to die in the next year and priced it accordingly, I would pay out the expected amount when that happened. Everyone is a potential customer, you just have to sell them the right product at the right price.

 

75 of them were not likely to die. You had no information that they were. Not even an actuarial table says this. Or even a smart phone. That's why you sold it to them in the first place.

That's what is called an information asymmetry and why you don't need an actuarial table, anong other things, for manufacturing widgets, you dummy, and it's why the wholw industry exists at all.

 

My widget factory also might burn down, I guess that means manufacturing doesn't exist. Here in reality, life insurance uses actuarial tables and other tools to make reasonable determinations of who is likely to die when and life insurance is priced accordingly. Sure, in a fantasy scenario there may be a life insurance company where 75% of the insured are unexpectedly wiped out in a covered event and the company is bankrupted. Hell, in a real world scenario AIG went bankrupt when it sold it's insurance products poorly (and here comes the moral hazard) and the United States bailed them out.

I'm not sure what you are trying to prove. Can insurance companies go under? Yes, they can.

 

Yes, your factory could burn down, which is why you have insurance because you don't hsve the ability to predict it regardless of the "information age"

Anyway, insurance companies having inadequate reserves is not a "fantasy scenario" at all - it's literally the history of insurance markets because they are fundamentally different from goods markets due to information asymmetry -regardless of "the information age"

...That saying that health care & health insurance economics have been solved and can be treated like any other goods (widgets) - because we live in "the information age" - is just, hahaha no.

Go back to whining about Obamacare all you want but people should understand how much you know about the underlying subject, which is apparently very little even by the subhuman standards of important internet arguing and rebuttals of "the information age"

 

It sounds like in pretty much every other government job and many private jobs the “gifts” Thomas has accepted and not reported this would be grounds for dismissal.

I was reading an article about the cost relationship between developers in Turkey and code officials in the area where the earthquake struck. In those incidences too wealthy developers were giving “gifts” to people whose duty was to interpret and enforce the building code and we can see the results.

Apparently the USSC is as ethical as Turkish building officials.

 

Every ****ING thing about EVERYONE in the GOP screams grift, CON, and CROOKED - they have become MOB ruled, and people are ok with that.

No integrity at all if you support Trump or Thomas - none - you can't be an honest person and support a crook.

DD

 

Exactly. If investigative reporting can show that Sotomayor, Kagan or Jackson have repeatedly engaged in, effectively, patronage for years then they should also be removed from the court. The bigger issue here is that the court is, in comparison to our other branches of government, a black box. They don't allow cameras to view their proceedings, they don't give press conferences, they engage with the public as much or as little as they want, and their rulings affect hundreds of millions of people. It's right to feel frustrated that 1/3 of our federal government wraps itself in secrecy and, due to intense partisanship, is effectively unaccountable to the people it serves.

 

The court circling its wagons is not a good look. The court should be transparent and open, not defensive about its corruption. Frankly, they should all be impeached - all 9 of them. Start over and select 9 justices that are as non-partisan as possible to restore faith in the court, 9 justices who pledge transparency and to be without conflict of interest.


As for treating anyone - it's not just a law, it's the hippocratic oath. Doctors are ethically bound to treat anyone with or without insurance if their life is in danger. Plus, if you didn't, many people with insurance would die as hospitals/doctors waited for proof of insurance or to get coverage verified. You can't do this - you'd see hundreds of thousands of deaths on your hands - including loved ones. Do you really want that? You really want dying people to not have their lives saved so your premium can be lowered or do you want a better system?

 

consider the source, infamous for

"Alternative facts" was a phrase used by U.S. Counselor to the President, Kellyanne Conway, during a Meet the Press interview on January 22, 2017,
in which she defended White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's false statement about the attendance numbers of Donald Trump's inauguration ...​

 

I hope the reporters working on these stories keep it and find any and all dirt on the entire court, conservative or liberal. SCOTUS acts like they live and work in a vacuum and were all supposed to just look the other way when a branch of government is not transparent to the people they work for. I had no clue any of this was happening and the more that comes out the worse the optics are, I think with the lifetime appointments they become too comfortable and feel like the rules do not apply to them and then when they do get caught they act like its ether no big deal , or they simply made a mistake. If its an honest mistake ok, like with Pence or Biden with classified docs, they both cooperated and while it looked bad it was an honest mistake that they rectified..........the gop wont do anything because it seems all the BS that comes out about their members doing the same grifting would have to admit there was a problem and they will NEVER do that.

 

I always thought the whole purpose of Leo & the fedsoc network was to maintain this fiction that everything was just academic and philosophical friends who - just you know , happened to share views, arrived at independently, of course that magically inure to the financial and political benefit of the powerful - but really they're just divinig the Framers like a modern day Joseph Smith and his magic plates. It's just that the plates say - heads we win, tails you lose.

Now you'd expect them to get lazy and sloppy over time, give the game away, like Alito and Thomas and Roberts and Barret regularly do these days in most of their public commets, but lol, Leonard Leo arranging secret payoffs to Ginni 6 - even I didn't think they were that clownishly corrupt.

The whole point of Leo & Crow and the Fed Soc is so you don't have to arrange secret payments

Big fail.

Anyway im sure Head Honcho Roberts and his investigation task force are all over this one, good hands!

 

I saw a post a few weeks ago where smebody made the point that SOME of these things that are being uncovered regarding the behavior of Thomas, Roberts and the rest were known about for a long time by the professional Supreme Court press and commentariat who don't see it as that bad.

The problem is that the professional Supreme Court press and commentariat is -purposefully, very clubby clubby with the Supreme Court and its bar and its network of lawyers and clerks and & subject to their more or less unchecked power for their livelihood, and so they are desensitized and incentivized not to make a big deal of these things that are pretty scandalous, given the perception of the Supreme Court that Roberts has traded off of for a long time, that his colleagues have now dragged through the dirt, and that he has done next to nothing to stop.

 

Clarence Thomas Promises To Adopt Code Of Ethics For The Right Price



WASHINGTON—Telling critics in Congress that if they wanted serious reform they simply needed to make it worth his while, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas promised Friday he would adopt a code of ethics for the right price. “After hearing out the Senate Judiciary Committee’s concerns, I admit to seeing the wisdom in developing some kind of ethical framework for the Supreme Court, so long as Papa gets some sugar,” the senior associate justice said in a prepared statement, emphasizing that he would be willing to submit to a code of conduct that included ignoring special interests and disclosing private trips if there was some serious coinage thrown his way. “It’s reasonable to believe justices serving on the highest court in the land should hold themselves to the highest ethical standards, if only so citizens can have faith in their decision-making process. And if that means so much to lawmakers, they should take whatever donors are giving me every year and double it. Also, in order for me to adhere to some sense of values, Ginni needs to wet her beak.”

Thomas suggested he might also support term limits for justices if he was guaranteed a yearly all-expenses-paid trip to the Maldives in retirement.

 

Even though satire, I can 100% imagine him saying this in private lol.