re: OT: GSB Primary/Political Stuff (Vote in bold)

The Great Wall of Trump. . .


What materials do you think it'll be made of?

Hash tag.Investment opportunity .

It will be finanaced by the rapist from Mexico and by the kkk, who may or may not be racist, and the uneducated voters will cheer loudly for the demigod who loves them.

Since the debate didn't happen, I think we should just make out votes in bold and I'll edit the OP with the results. I'm still deciding between Kasich and Rubio, but I'll have my final answer soon.

Trump gets absolutely destroyed.

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Very well thought out and laid out principles. Out of curiosity....are these your thoughts and conclusions, or did you get this from somewhere else? Not an accusation or a criticism...I am just wondering.

And what you are pointing out makes sense. Thanks for sharing.

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I've got a masters in Finance and have been a wealth manager/financial planner/stock broker going on 17 years, and have owned a wealth management and corporate benefits firm (with 3 partners) for nearly 13 of those 17 years.

On the corporate benefits side of my business, employer sponsored employee group health insurance is one of the things we do. I have 20 employees who run our in-house third party administration (TPA) of all our health plans. We have around 210 companies comprising about 16,000 employees that we administer.

I've seen first hand how insurance companies use networks to try and control medical related costs charged by doctors and hospitals and the like. I've seen what happens when new rules come down by the insurance commissioner or legislated by state or federal government. I've seen exactly how government run Medicare, Medicaid, Peach-care, Tri-care, social security disability, Obamacare, and VA hospitals all work in the system and how they try to control costs and create waiting lists and death panels and how the quality of care is so much worse.

Combine that with the fact I specialize in mostly individual wealth management/retirement planning and corporate retirement plans like 401k's, I do market analysis almost every day. I know everything it takes to run a business and I know what things happening in our economy effect businesses and the economy.

It has become abundantly clear to me why entitlement programs and socialistic concepts can't work in a free market capitalistic society... why they simply can't coexist.

It is impossible to mandate financial limits on a business or program or entity with regards to how much they pay employees or beneficiaries and charge for products and services when the costs to run that business or program or entity are based on the free market and have no relative limits.

Example: If I have a business producing and selling widgets, and the government says I have to pay my employees $15/hr and I can only charge $100 per widget, but the cost of materials for each widget is $25, the energy cost to run the production machines is $25, employee labor is $25, and taxes are $25, well then the government mandates are not only leaving me no profits for capital re-investment (which is the key to growth), but the profits are so small that I'm even paying less in taxes, which results in less revenue for the government, so now they start wanting to control costs even more and charge even higher percentage in taxes. And it starts a death spiral until I'm either drowning in debt or going out of business.

The government can't control the energy costs to run the production machines or the widget materials costs. The free market and laws of supply and demand control those. The laws of supply and demand should also control the level of employee wages too. But as you can see, the government is trying to dictate that as well, which is simply compounding the problem. It will force-feed unskilled workers into the system which will contribute to the reduction of quality of products and services. The limiting of profits will also reduce skilled workers who will seek employment elsewhere that doesn't limit their pay ceiling. Again, reducing quality. And then without capital re-investment, growth will stagnate and unemployment will rise as businesses die to this process.

Look at every entitlement program and government run entity and you'll see that this is where the flaw in its design is based and why it is failing and/or outrageously under-funded and completely unsustainable.

This is why there is no such thing as "Democratic Socialism" where the system has socialistic concepts mixed with free market concepts. Socialism, as Marx explained very clearly, is an all-or-nothing concept called "Communism", where EVERYTHING is controlled by the government.

Just look at China and North Korea for perfect examples in our lifetime of the global free market system completely ruining their economies and taking them down a path of unsustainability. Those countries are at the pinnacle of tyrannical regimes with horrible economies and teetering on the edge of a fiscal collapse. I can't imagine being a citizen of either one. Zero freedom would suck.

That's a completely seperate issue caused by the donor class corrupting the political establishment.

You see, some people here think that the solution to something like exorbitant healthcare costs is to simply create a tax, spread out the expense across the earners, and give it to everyone. And then pass legislation that sets cost control measures.

They think this because they think the problem lies with greedy rich people who make profits on healthcare related products and services are simply taking advantage of people.

But that's not where the actual cause of exorbitant healthcare costs come from and the "solution" of Universal Healthcare via tax and entitlement isn't a solution at all, as I've explained what happens when trying to implement such an entitlement inside a free market society.

The problem is the donor class, which of course is made up of greedy rich people, can influence the federal and local political establishment to continually enact policy that stifles competition and manipulates the natural flow of supply and demand laws. This country is filled to the brim with regional-monopolies.

Companies come up with a product or service. They make a ton of money. They donate money to which ever politicians will help them turn their company into a monopoly, or close to it. Patent and copyright laws play a big role, as well as lack of enforcement of anti-trust laws. The legal system is abused by litigious over-use and over-reach to prevent competition from creating similar products or services, and this ultimately holds smaller business down while the bigger guy gets to set the price instead of supply and demand setting the price.

It's a snowball effect, and the healthcare industry has suffered the most from it.

There's really only a small few medical equipment manufacturers, for instance. There's dozens and dozens of middle-man distributors, but they all get their supply from the same 2 or 3 super rich manufacturing companies who allow them to slap their name on the products.

And any smaller manufacturer who comes along and tries to make a similar product for cheaper that they'll sell for cheaper gets sued, tied up in the courts for ages, wastes so much money and time on legal expenses, that ultimately they just go away. If they some how make it through one scenario, they're just sued again on something else and they start over. Meanwhile, the big company is pressing the politicians they've bought to ignore tort reform bills, ignore patent and copyright reform bills, and convince the justice department to not waste their time with anti-trust complaints.

So we end up with 100 absurdly mega-wealthy companies that may split their industry with like one other entity. Like Microsoft and Apple, for example. And there's the illusion that neither is a monopoly. But that's BS. Nobody can come close to becoming actual competition to these 100 companies. They can bury anyone that tries almost instantly.

Then there's about 300-400 super-wealthy companies below them that are more regionalized. So there might be 3-4 of the similar company, but they each own a niche or a region. And they just do what the big-100 do, but just not against the other 3-4 similar companies. And then, they all collude to set the price of their product or service since they're not allowing free market supply and demand to do it.

And again, they all donate to the political establishment to ensure their status-quo and stifle free market competition.

So what's the actual cause and basis of it all? The ability of the donor class to influence political policy.

Free market capitalism, governed by the laws of supply and demand, in this country is only happening below about the top 500 wealthiest companies. Which mostly revolves around non-essential products and services. Everything else, which essentially controls all of our essential products and services, is run under monopolies.

And to fix this, we have to end completely the ability for a donor class to exist. We have to end completely the ability to buy influence from the political establishment. This will allow REAL regulation reform and law enforcement to finally happen, and competition to be restored across all levels and all industry, and the free market system to reel in costs.