The dark fiber analogy doesn't quite work though, because unused fiber just sits there harmlessly. Nuclear plants have massive decommissioning costs ($280M-600M+ per plant), ongoing waste storage requirements, and if the companies go bust, taxpayers are likely on the hook. The EU alone is underfunded by €118 billion on decommissioning. Meanwhile batteries and solar keep getting cheaper every year without the “who pays to clean this up in 50 years” problem. Seems like a very roundabout way to hope for public benefit.
You can substitute cocoa sources globally, but you can't substitute a house in Charlotte with one in Phoenix.
If cocoa prices spike, you buy less chocolate. If housing prices spike in your job market, your options are: pay more, endure a brutal commute, or uproot your life. The demand is far more inelastic.
The national average obscures that institutional investors own 1 in 9 rental homes in Charlotte, 1 in 10 in Tampa, and one-fifth of all houses in some Atlanta neighborhoods. It’s likely to get worse too.
Have you tried buying a home recently? It’s very tough to compete against the all-cash offers from investors.
In the past few years I’ve been involved in 7 real estate transactions in California, and haven’t seen a single “all cash offer from investors” on any of them.
I hear this rhetoric a lot, but it’s almost always from people who have never actually been involved in selling a home, or are shopping for a home way out of their price range and were going to get outbid anyway.
That's surprising given the data. Were these transactions recent? Investors focus on entry-level properties, so if you're buying above that tier you'd see less competition. But California overall has high investor activity:
“In 2025’s first half, 36% of purchases statewide were made by investors – up from 31% for all of 2024 and 16% at the recent low in 2020 as coronavirus was scrambling the economy.”
OK, well are the economics in those markets worse than similar markets with lower levels of PE ownership of homes? Is there a correlation there that we can see in the data? Because otherwise stats from a couple moderate sized cities doesn’t seem that relevant to the nation as a whole.
Owning 1 in 9 "rental" homes means they own less than 1% of all homes.
You could make an offer on 40+ houses and will likely never be in a 'bidding war' with a big PE firm or a company backed by one.
PE is a boogeyman used by politicians to obscure the uncomfortable fact that the problem is the policies they themselves have implemented in pretty much every community in the western world (making building new stuff defacto illegal).
I don't generally agree, i think they should be able to buy them as well. We can't limit how many homes people own, how do you rent then? What do we classify as "too much" house ownership? 10?100?1000?
A mom and pop landlord with 5 rentals doesn't have pricing power. A firm owning 1 in 5 homes in a neighborhood does. That's why antitrust thresholds exist in other industries.
Owner-builder rather than for sale. By doing that, I was able to opt out of building codes, inspections, licensing, any building plans, and most the other horse shit that makes it so expensive.
Depends on where you live, but if you build for yourself it's a non-commercial activity which can drop off a lot of red tape. Cost me only ~60k to build a house last year by doing everything myself. I did have to sign an affidavit promising not to sell it in X time to get the county to issue a permit like that.
Most people can't build their own home (time, skills, land access, upfront capital for materials). It's like responding to “healthcare is too expensive” with “I just treated my own broken arm”.
Most people can actually; for awhile most families did. The thing stopping them is largely the state. I got my land for "a song" post COVID when home prices were already insane. Near lots of jobs too. I used a rarely used 'loophole' to build it for about 1/4 the cost of what anything around me costs. It did cost me 60k, but for 30k (the price of a newish car, which you see even in many section 8 / welfare areas, so accessible even sometimes to the 'lower' class) you could easily finish out a 200 sq ft shed with a plumbed haul water cistern, minimal solar, a wood stove, and a simple waste treatment system. Then as you have more money, expand. You don't even have to have all the money at one time; many families in latin america or SEA just buy blocks as money allows and slowly build over time (masonry construction more forgiving of this).
I've even found land for <100k in places like San Francisco that is enough to drop a shipping container on, but of course the fascists won't let you, better to be homeless and shit hepatitis into the street than have an unpermitted shipping container and bury some 50 gallon drums and drain field DIY septic system.
1) Google 'opt out' or 'no permit' 'no codes' counties in USA.
2) Watched basically every video by larry haun and read his book (the entire theory to build structure of a house is explained in ~3 hours, but I think I watched it 5 or 8 times)
3) Looked at simple cabin / small home plans
There are a couple civil engineering 'saints' that visit some of the cabin and small home forums online. I won't reveal who they are. They pop up randomly and intermittently and tend to not respond unless people are actually in the middle of a home build because there are always a gazillion people that are 'going to do it' but then never do and waste everyone's time with questions. I ran through a lot of my roof structure through them because the IRC is quite sparse on roof design and wind load capacities. I also have a friend that is a civil engineer and ran things through them a lot, although in the end following the examples by larry haun and the IRC he did not recommend much different.
I basically just followed IRC design to frame a simple rectangular house with gable roof. This is about the easiest house to frame, other than one with a shed roof. I would recommend 16' max width because the lumber is much easier to get and then you can use a perimeter foundation as your only foundational load bearing points. But you can get away with 20' wide if you have the means to find and haul it, otherwise you're dealing with a more complex foundation or engineered joists.
I've also seen success with friends finishing out shipping containers. In that case you may be able to just build piers with sonotubes, drop a shipping container, frame the inside (all non-structural, so if you fuck it up not a huge deal), then use the inside framing to build like a conventional wooden home (except you will need an insulation that does not need to breath). The caveat here is that if you want any windows or doors other than the one already part of it, you will need to know how to weld and cut steel.
I think you're conflating the Democratic Party with "left-wing philosophy." Actual left-wing ideology (Marx, Lenin, the socialist tradition) focuses on material conditions for workers: who owns the means of production, labor power, class relations.
From that perspective, the problem isn't that Democrats have the wrong messaging about masculinity. It's that neither major US party offers politics centered on workers' material interests. Both parties abandoned class-based politics in favor of cultural appeals.
If you're a young man struggling economically, being told you have "privilege" feels disconnected from your reality of declining wages and diminished prospects. But the socialist response isn't "better messaging about masculinity," it's organizing workers to gain power over their economic conditions.
> Throughout the 19th century, the main line dividing Left and Right was between supporters of the French republic and those of the monarchy's privileges.
It's fun to consider those same dividing lines in the current US climate: once again, it's the right wing that tries very hard to establish an absolute ruler, while the left aims to maintain the current republic (or to salvage what's left of it).
Left wing philosophy did not start and end with Marx. Leftists who pretend 1900s era leftism is somehow the True Left are annoying. He was just one in a series of extremely far left thinkers.
Most people with a good historical education would point to the original leftists being the Jacobins. That's where we get the terms left and right from. But you could also argue that even Jesus Christ was a leftist by the standards of his day, and we just struggle to see it because politics as we know it now didn't exist back then. He wasn't a fan of capitalism! The Bible says he preached peace and then went in with some followers and beat up market traders for no better reason than he thought trade shouldn't be allowed around temples (or we can infer he didn't like markets and traders in general, but having cast himself as a religious figure he had no excuse to rail against it in non-religious places).
> Both parties abandoned class-based politics in favor of cultural appeals.
Yes they did because Marxist thought is wrong and destructive. It should have never been adopted at all but after lots of evidence in the 20th century most people did give it up. The notion of "class" is a poor description of reality. Marxism always had trouble classifying small business owners. They do manual physical labor, so should be working class, but they are also capitalists. He would have been baffled by the ramen eating startup grinders of today. Marxism has no way to properly incorporate this basic and common fact into its thinking. Or, he probably wouldn't be baffled really, because if you read a biography of him it's clear he hardly ever left his study and was uninterested in exploring the real world outside of books and newspapers. His friend Engels invited him to visit a factory Engles owned, and Marx refused, despite supposedly fighting for the factory workers.
> The notion of "class" is a poor description of reality. Marxism always had trouble classifying small business owners. They do manual physical labor, so should be working class, but they are also capitalists.
Not even in the least. There’s a lot to critique in Marx and Engels but there is much written about Marx’s theory of alienation. He would say “The best form of work is unalienated labor.”
A person working, developing and feeling connected to the fruits of their labor, fulfilling the needs of his society is exactly what he prescribed.
But "alienation" is a concept Marx made up and that only he used. Nobody talks about that today and you don't find talk of "alienation" even in very Marxist institutions like unions because it doesn't mean anything concrete.
> A person working, developing and feeling connected to the fruits of their labor, fulfilling the needs of his society is exactly what he prescribed.
So if a rich CEO feels connected to the fruits of his extensive labor, he's not a capitalist and should be left alone during the revolution of the proletariat then? Somehow none of the people who put communism into practice got that memo.
Yeah, sorry, trying to find any sense in Marxism is a waste of time. The man was a very poor thinker. People who view him as insightful tend to conflate quantity with quality. He wrote lots of books, therefore he must be smart and have something to contribute. The man's theories don't describe the real world correctly, let alone successfully predict what happens if people act on his advice. Not even if you allow him to invent his own non-existent emotions and states of being like alienation.
Marx being such an obscure figure with little impact on the course of modern history, it doesn’t surprise me that you never got a chance to read it, but alienation is definitely “talked about”, the critique of capitalism is part and parcel of Marx specifically, the material conditions of workers play HEAVILY into it. He didn’t just emerge from some cottage with this idea, he was observing the Industrial Revolution.
If the bourgeoisie CEO (capital owner?) feels connected to the fruit of his labor it makes a difference for their material conditions, but has no bearing on capitalist-or-not.
In an economics setting you’ll talk more about the labor theory of value and so forth, alienation of the aristocracy wasn’t the thrust of the work. Your example could maybe point at the idea of “golden handcuffs”, however the classic Yes Men prank on the WTO is more the reality ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yK9Cs_UcTEE )
This is all of course a point of curiosity alone, since the rare encounters with Marx are restricted to philosophy, economics, history, political science, sociology and advanced psychology programs.
Boeing was the prime contractor for the SLS core stage and upper stages, and Northrop Grumman builds the solid rocket boosters. The entire rocket was outsourced to private industry.
The CPU in such switches is far too slow to do any data plane operations, so performance is entirely due to the hardware switching. Replacing Ubiquiti's OS with OpenWRT just gets you a different management interface for configuring the hardware features that actually handle traffic. (Unless for some reason you desperately want to have a VPN endpoint that would be limited to a few Mb/s at best.)
Ubiquiti make great hardware, however a lot of people hate the software as it is buggy and inconsistent. This at least gives those people options to run something a bit more opoen and manageable under the hood.
Project author here. This project is 4 years old at this point, and now it probably makes more sense to use Mac minis or mini pcs. I also wouldn’t rely on cheap colocation for anything security sensitive or critical. They gave my same block of IPs to another customer at some point and there were issues with IP conflicts (eventually got resolved).
It lasted for about 3 years and the colocation company went bankrupt and got bought by another company, so they returned the hardware. I’m surprised a technical failure didn’t kill it.
Another thing I had issues with cheap small time colocation was that people were using it for spamming/phishing and they got the whole ISP IP range blocked with spamhaus. I was running a legit mailserver so it was really annoying.
I rooted around on the block for a bit and I found several phishing sites, it was a mess.
The problem is the more serious colocators don't really want you if you just want 1U. And if they allow it it's definitely not for a good price.
For 1U I'd generally just opt for a rented managed server unless I had a really compelling reason for why I wanted to use specifically my own hardware (e.g. I needed something very esotheric).
Probably yes, but it's also that setting up all the physical access administration etc might not be worth it for them for a customer that pays $15 a month. Which is what I used to pay for my 1U (including power, but it was a super low energy server)
Depends on the Mac mini model I think; used Mac mini m4 16gb 256gb are priced quite low compared to the performance - I believe close to best bang for the buck - and are I believe near best energy efficiency. I love them for heavy cpu tasks without loud fans and heat in my office (pcs did this in my previous homelab setup for a bit less performance).
The higher specced max minis (more memory or pro)
Are worse bang for buck.
I'd love to have possibility to compare M4 with Ryzen 5700u as a server. I've read a comparison of M1 against 5700u and it was quite good price for value tbh.
EDIT
According to some site M4 is 2 times faster and 3 times more expensive, while you can later add memory to Ryzen but not to M4
So the people back in 2021 in the prior Hacker News discussion saying that they were worried about component failures … turned out to be worrying about completely the wrong thing. (-:
If you're using good power supplies, name brand microSD cards, and don't hammer them with writes all day, you can have a Pi 2/3/4/5 running for years with no stability issues.
I think 99% of problems people have are related to one of those three things (same with most embedded devices, but people tend not to throw a cheap used phone charger and the SD card that came with an old cheap drone on more specialized devices).
Do you know what the most cost effective hardware for general internet stuff is currently? I do ML and have to deal with removing tens of kilowatts from a small closet when it comes to on prem stuff - mainly for compliance reasons - and I have no idea what good, cheap low power hardware for web, sql and similar servers is.
For general internet stuff, a Mac mini or any SFF pc will be just fine. For ML, you’ll need at least a dozen or more thousand for GPU’s if you run your own inference. If you use a 3rd party, like OpenAI, it’s just an API call and you can do that on your SFF mini or pi.
Web hosts can start at $10 (or free + internet) and GPU hosts can start at $4,000 USD.
At peak, a “cluster node” could be $10,000 and a GPU node could be $80,000.
The question you have to ask yourself is: what are your requirements.
GM announced a $10 billion stock buyback in November 2023, literally weeks after claiming they couldn't afford worker raises during the UAW strike that cost them $1.1 billion. Since 2015, GM has authorized $37.7 billion in total buybacks while their new UAW contract costs $9.3 billion over four years. When you can find $10 billion for buybacks immediately after settling a strike, the problem isn't "expensive labor". It's management that chose financial engineering over building competitive manufacturing capabilities.
Yes, but companies run for investors will always have to pay investors, so it would have either been a buyback or dividends. When interest rates go up, companies end up competing with government bonds, and they must give dividends that keep them competitive, and in 2023 that was something like 4.3%.
For investing in the future to be possible interest rates must essentially be low.
I've thought a little about this problem, because recently we had situations where we simultaneously had inflation and needed investments to produce products in new ways to counter that inflation, and this obviously leads to a situation where it's difficult to get out of the problem. If we increase the interest rates then we stop the inflation, but the interest rates will be too high for investments to counter them. Concretely: Northvolt was trying to do American-style doomscaling and then interest rates went up, so they went under.
I believe that there is a solution: giving the central banks the additional tool to set a mandatory savings fraction of wages-- that is, that the central banks are allowed to set a fraction of wages that must be saved, and which may be invested or used to start a company but which isn't allowed to be used for consumption.
If you then have inflation and consumers are bidding over each other for goods and driving up the prices the central bank can increase the savings fraction without changing the interest rate. So plausible, in case of inflation you'd look at the need for capital to get out of it: if there's no need for capital to build new things and get out of it, then you just increase the interest rate, if there is, you increase the mandatory savings rate.
I thought about voluntary solutions, but suppose that we consider a savings pacts-- i.e. ordinary people get together and agree to all save a certain fraction of their income, then this drives down prices, so whoever deviates from the pact gets so much goods that he's really happy with what he gets for his money. Consequently such savings pacts are unstable and the savings pact must be mandatory.
I also think this is especially right for Europe. I calculated that if the central banks set this at 5% then this is enough for Draghi's €800B of needed investment, but it's obviously also applicable to the US if the US wants to transition to EVs, and now you have even higher interest rates than we do, so this policy might actually be the right thing for you too.
Not to pick on you, but you stared your pay with a series of trivia steak arguments - but all examples of things I see repeated with little consideration.
> Yes, but companies run for investors will always have to pay investors, so it would have either been a buyback or dividends.
Your argument here is that the pivot two things companies can spend money on is dividends or stock buybacks? An incredibly false choice. They can also clearly invest in staying competitive.
> When interest rates go up, companies end up competing with government bonds, and they must give dividends that keep them competitive,
Why do you think they must do this? These aren't bonds - people aren't looking to park money at a risk free rate. They are stocks - different investments with different expectations. Setting the expectation of one based on the other is false. They should be ensuring the can keep with with short term growth of more than 4% per year non adjusted, which should be easy in an inflationary environment.
And let's dig further into what you said about this "must". Must implies no other reasonable option - the consequences of anything else would be to negative. So when you say they must do buy backs or higher dividends, I ask "or else what?". Simply put, what hairband is they don't? The company doesn't fold. Consumers don't suddenly stop buying their products. What actually happens that they need to avoid?
Not much really much of note really. They say/signal "instead of giving you this money right now, we're going to invest it to remain competitive and more productive in the future".
If some investors don't believe them or doubt want to wait the stock price dips for some period of time and then rebounds as those investments become realized with increased efficiency and superior products.
> For investing in the future to be possible interest rates must essentially be low.
Finally this is wrong. It doesn't require low interest rates is you're flush with cash. If you've given away all of your cash then yes you need to borrow to invest. But if you have tons of cash you don't need to borrow to have cash.
GM's stock price is below inflation since new-GM went public 15y ago, and that's with 37B in buybacks. What do you think would've happened to the stock without them?
Do you think investors, especially institutional ones that manage retirement funds etc. would just ignore the CEO/board and not receive any returns?
> Yes, but companies run for investors will always have to pay investors
> I believe that there is a solution
If changing the first is not your solution, you have no solution.
OP was saying that US companies will keep losing market until they are completely outcompeted. Finding a way to win this competition while keeping "investors" pockets full is impossible.
Yes, but in this case the investors will be ordinary people, and the payment will effectively be the products that ordinary people want.
Suppose that cheap electric car mass production is possible with new production technology, and that there's inflation because of high petrol costs. Suppose that interest rates are 5% to prevent inflation. Even if the automobile manufacturers understand that it has to be done and is feasible with some for them to survive they won't be able to do it.
However, with this interest rates can be lower because inflation is prevented by the mandatory savings. The resources to build the cheap thing will actually be available.
If done internationally this will also greatly reduce the profits of oil producing countries: suppose that the US, the EU, China and India, all big consumers of oil, agreed on a mandatory savings rate of at least 1%. Then the ordinary people have less money to bid up the price of oil against each other, but do have money to invest in businesses that substitute for oil production. The co-ordination allows ordinary people and non-resource extracting countries to get more of the pie.
How is it socialism? There's no löntagarfonder, there's no requirement to sell parts of companies-- wage labour still exists and while this would create a force which would lead to ordinary people owning a lot of capital, since the fact that companies would be making less profit on some goods would thus end up with reduced value, thus a reduced price, and that these people who are now required to be capital owners would likely buy at this reduced price, but it is not a socialist idea.
It's a patch on the floating-exchange-rate-and-policy-by-interest-rate of monetarist and Keynsianism to make it function in situations where there's both inflation and a need for investment.
I think the transition to this sort of as the US decision to decouple the dollar from gold. A way to get things more sensible.
> How is it socialism? ... There's no löntagarfonder
And yet that's also you:
> Yes, but in this case the investors will be ordinary people, and the payment will effectively be the products that ordinary people want.
Well, this is essentially löntagarfonder but worse because it's funded by the people under the threat of violence (mandatory savings), not from corporate profits.
> that these people who are now required to be capital owners would likely buy at this reduced price, but it is not a socialist idea.
So, the people are forced to buy the ridiculously inflated marked at ridiculously inflated prices for the faint hope that "likely" they'll get lower prices on something far in the "glorious bright future" (tm). And that's not socialism?
Well, a careful analysis reveals that "likely" is quite unlikely, the people forced to "invest" are going to lose their shirts and inflation will actually accelerate, only the well connected will benefit because they will be in control of this devious scam.
You are obviously not familier with the many forms of socialism and you argue about irrelevant details. Mandatory savings equals socialism, monopolization equals socialism - it's not Stalin's socialism, it's Mussolini's socialism - lets not forget, he was the Duce of the Italian Social Republic. As Hitler was the head of the National Socialist German Workers Party.
>Well, this is essentially löntagarfonder but worse because it's funded by the people under the threat of violence (mandatory savings), not from corporate profits.
Eveything is done under the threat of violence, including things like land ownership. We're not running some kind of country-sized anarcho-syndicalist commune, so presumably we must operate on some other basis of morality, where we don't really care about this threat of violence stuff.
>So, the people are forced to buy the ridiculously inflated marked at ridiculously inflated prices for the faint hope that "likely" they'll get lower prices on something far in the "glorious bright future" (tm). And that's not socialism?
No, the people aren't forced to buy any stock. They keep the money uninvested or whatever they want, as long as they don't spend it. They'll invest it in order to achieve returns, to use at the point when they do get to spend it.
>Well, a careful analysis reveals that "likely" is quite unlikely, the people forced to "invest" are going to lose their shirts and inflation will actually accelerate, only the well connected will benefit because they will be in control of this devious scam.
Only if they're bad at investing, but many will joint together to form funds and try to hire professionals. Presumably banks would offer services to help people deal with their mandatory savings sensibly.
>You are obviously not familier with the many forms of socialism and you argue about irrelevant details. Mandatory savings equals socialism, monopolization equals socialism - it's not Stalin's socialism, it's Mussolini's socialism - lets not forget, he was the Duce of the Italian Social Republic. As Hitler was the head of the National Socialist German Workers Party.
That's the everything-is-socialism, including capitalism is socialism. I prefer the Marxist view: socialism is to each-according-to-his-contribution.
The only thing that is like that in our society is copyright, and this proposed policy isn't either.
> No, the people aren't forced to buy any stock. They keep the money uninvested or whatever they want, as long as they don't spend it.
There's no such thing as "uninvested", unless the money is in the form of currency under a mattress but this would create such a mess that if Keynes hears about it he won't stop spinning in the long term.
And what the fresh hell is to use money for "whatever they want, as long as they don't spend it"... excluding the mattress, what else can you do with money?
You're simply throwing ideas at the wall without understanding their implications, if you're human you've got to take some econ classes and find an example that is close to what you propose - everything has been tried at some point or another - then we'll have something real to discuss.
They can start a company, they can put it in the stock market, they can invest it in a friend's company, they can invest in land, or in developing land, they can invest it in a fund, etc.
So you say, they can spend it on any of these assets. It's still spending and it's forced spending on the asset market for the benefit of rich asset owners with the associated risk of lost shirts - I've already addressed it before.
You're moving in circles and not providing the historical example I asked for. Let's get real, shall we?
Why frame it as ideological though? That doesn't explain which agencies get protected and which get cut. The NTSB stays funded because rich people fly on planes too. But Medicaid gets cut because wealthy people don't need it.
Look at weather service cuts. They're gutting the National Weather Service while Trump's appointees have ties to companies like AccuWeather and Satellogic that would profit from privatizing weather data.
It's about class interests. Agencies that serve everyone or that rich people depend on stay funded. Programs that only help poor people get cut, or get privatized to benefit specific wealthy interests. Make the wealthy better off through tax cuts and new business opportunities, make poor people worse off through service cuts.
You're right that a lot of the NOAA cuts target climate research specifically. But think about who benefits from attacking climate science. Oil companies and existing wealth structures that profit from fossil fuels. Climate research threatens those business models, so gutting it protects those interests.
The cuts go way beyond climate though. They're cutting 107,000 federal jobs across agencies while defense spending increases 13%. Framing this as ideological makes it sound like an abstract battle of ideas, but it's not abstract at all. Real people are losing health insurance, real hospitals are closing, real communities are losing weather warnings. Meanwhile wealthy people get tax cuts and connected companies get business opportunities. It's about material interests, not ideology.
Can you point out what aspects of the bill relating to Medicaid are most concerning? I don't just mean the DNC talking points, but rather specific provisions. When I read through the actual provisions[1] they are far less scary than what I hear being used as DNC fundraising fodder. For instance, I can't just show up in the UK without any legal status and automatically have all free healthcare from the NHS[2]. But the provisions removing federal tax money support to provide free healthcare to the undocumented is one of the things being pointed to by opponents of the bill as being especially evil. If you feel that way, why is the US the only country that ought to do that?
The work requirements force people to file paperwork proving 80 hours of work monthly, and Arkansas showed this paperwork maze caused 18,000+ people to lose coverage even though 95% already met the requirements or qualified for exemptions. Arkansas spent $26.1 million just on administration with no increase in employment, and Georgia has spent over $40 million with 80% going to bureaucracy, not healthcare.
For rural hospitals, the bill cuts $58 billion in Medicaid funding over 10 years but only provides a $25 billion rural fund that covers less than half the losses. This puts 300+ rural hospitals at immediate risk of closure since they're already operating on thin margins.
For elderly people, the bill blocks nursing home staffing rules until 2034 and freezes home equity limits at $1 million permanently, plus adds more verification requirements.
The evidence shows these aren't about efficiency. They're about creating barriers that cost more money to administer than they save, while cutting care for people who already qualify.
It's not about whether they can work 20 hours. Most already do. Arkansas found 95% of people either met the requirements or qualified for exemptions, but 18,000+ still lost coverage due to the paperwork maze.
The requirements are designed to create barriers through bureaucracy. You have to report every month through a specific online portal, track your hours precisely, navigate exemption processes. Miss one monthly filing deadline and you lose healthcare. It's the most socially acceptable way to kick people off coverage without saying "we don't want poor people to have healthcare."
And it's not just work requirements. The bill also adds income verification twice a year instead of once, more asset checks, and cuts the actual funding. Each new hoop is another chance for eligible people to fall through the cracks. The goal is reducing enrollment through administrative friction, not promoting work.
> saying "we don't want poor people to have healthcare."
I don't really think it's about 'poor people' at all. I think most people agree with me that poor people who do their best deserve plenty of help.
From ABC News: "Pew found that around half of Americans would favor creating work requirements for Medicaid, with 32% opposed." [1]
Polling shows (and Trump's popular vote victory also suggests, arguably) that American voters largely are not in favor of freeloaders who don't work and rely on government benefits paid for by those who do work. Given that this country still operates on democratic principles, it's a democratic move to give those voters what they want, even if it isn't the most efficient. I think if you asked those voters why, they'd say that they're concerned that training people to expect a welfare program to pay for you without you having any obligation back is bad for us as a society, and could encourage more and more 'dropping out' leaving a larger burden for those who work, who our society does need to keep working.
If you want universal healthcare, tell the DNC to run on a platform that includes that instead of running a terrible candidate and a bunch of culture-war stuff that's deeply unpopular with moderates. Or abandon that worthless party and start one that can win.
> Pew found that around half of Americans would favor creating work requirements for Medicaid, with 32% opposed.
To me, this is sad. Culturally, we need to stop attaching morality and nobility to “work.” You’re not better and/or more deserving of life and health than others simply because you have a job.
What's the point of making requirements even stricter if they cost more to administer than they save and don't increase employment? The Congressional Budget Office estimates 5.2 million people would lose coverage by 2034, with savings primarily coming from eligible people losing coverage due to paperwork barriers rather than increased employment.[1]
The new bill allows states to verify monthly instead of every three months, so people lose coverage faster. Even working people get tripped up because 43% of workers would fail to meet 80 hours in at least one month due to variable schedules common in low-wage jobs.[2] People with multiple jobs have to submit paystubs from each employer monthly. Seasonal workers and food service workers are especially vulnerable because their hours swing wildly due to factors beyond their control.
The cost of government subsidies isn’t in just the subsidies or the administrative overhead alone. It’s in training people to rely on the government, in effectively subsidizing employers that pay less than a living wage, etc.
You're right that Medicaid subsidizes employers who pay poverty wages rely on taxpayers to provide healthcare for their workers instead of paying living wages themselves. But the solution isn't to eliminate Medicaid and leave workers with nothing. The solution is to raise the minimum wage or have universal healthcare so employers actually have to provide real benefits.
Most Medicaid recipients already work. They're not choosing dependency, they're working jobs that don't pay enough to afford healthcare. Taking away their healthcare doesn't suddenly make employers pay more, it just leaves workers desperate, which is exactly what those employers want.
You're essentially arguing we should eliminate the safety net that keeps our low-wage economy functioning. That would either force employers to pay living wages (unlikely) or create mass suffering among workers (more likely). Which outcome are you hoping for? Because right now it sounds like you'd rather have sick, desperate workers than challenge the employers who created this system.
Seasonal workers are explicitly protected in the final bill as long as their average amount of work makes sense, so that argument is out.
Also, this "verify monthly" sounds like fearmongering. All I see is "requires individuals who are enrolled meet requirements for 1 or more months between the most recent eligibility redeterminations (at least twice per year)." Also: "Requires states to conduct eligibility redeterminations at least every 6 months for Medicaid expansion adults."
The Medicaid expansion is not everyone on Medicaid, just a subset who before expansion were presumed not to be entitled to a government subsidy since they don't have any dependents or any disability and could just work.
I do think it's probably not the worst thing if people who have no dependents or disability are motivated to go get a full-time job because it's kind of a hassle to have to prove eligibility.
The DNC is now advocating that taxpayers not only must pay for all the healthcare of people who don't want to work at all, but we also need to make it a maximally convenient experience. The reason Democrats keep losing elections is that they can't read the room -- most people who work and are not upper-middle-class levels of comfort don't like the emphasis on maximizing the comfort and convenience of groups like the voluntarily unemployed and undocumented immigrants when it comes at the expense of working taxpayers who follow the rules. This is why the Big Beautiful Bill passed: It actually throws a bone to people who work via things like tax breaks on overtime pay and tips, and via restoring the SALT exemption. Between these 3 policies, you can see a benefit to people across the wealth spectrum who share one thing in common: people who work hard. I know the Dems are still doing fine in rich areas, but there are two problems which are intertwined:
1. There aren't enough of those rich Democrats who just want to open the tax money spigot, the ones who wouldn't mind paying an extra $30,000 in taxes next year to put their money where their mouth is.
2. Even when there are enough to win, the rest of the population still pays most of the actual tax dollars and they are increasingly resentful of what they see as rich Democrats helping themselves (via the government) to everybody's money to bestow as favors on people who don't seem to need it. I know your heart is in the right place, but the policies are not connecting with the people, as evidenced by the fact that the Democrats keep losing ground among the non-wealthy working demographic (which, in the Democrat narrative, ought to be their strongest base).
Note: I certainly don't agree with everything in the "OBBB," but there are some good ideas in there.
