Who Does it Better?

 

Who Really Does it Better?

 

    The Big Lie from the Right is that Brits pay through the nose for lower quality healthcare in the form of “higher taxes.” (always a generality never a factual, analysis) A close second is the "Oh Yeah", then why does everyone buy private insurance?" I'll refute  the second first. They don't. Only About a tenth of Britons have private insurance, and it's really  more like a supplement. So there.   

    The United Kingdom provides public healthcare to all permanent residents, about 58 million people. Healthcare coverage is free at the point of need and is paid for by general taxation. About 18% of a citizen's income tax goes towards healthcare, which is about 4.5% of the average citizen's income. For simplicity’s sake I will convert pounds to dollars for comparison:

    The personal exemption in the UK is $17,770. In the US it is $4,050 (2020) Even with proposed significant increases in exemption, the UK exemption will be at least $5,000 higher. 

    A couple in the UK who earns $37,500 before taxes will, with the 2 personal exemptions, be just under the 20% tax bracket. In other words, no income tax. With a taxable income between $25,140 and $70,400, the tax rate is 20%. Between $74,000 and $210,000 the rate is 40%. Above $210,000 to infinity the rate is 45%.   So why do all this math?  Bear with me a bit longer.

    And: This isn't a quality contest, there are horror stories about health care issues in every single medical facility on earth, and your "My British uncle had to wait 6 months for a new hip," is eclipsed by the guy in Tampa for whom surgeons amputated the wrong foot! 

     In the US, under the current “Trump” tax reduction, which is to be constant for higher brackets but will decrease for lower earners, a couple with combined taxable incomes of (rounding off) $20,000 to $80,000 will be taxed at 12%. However, using 2020 numbers: The UK couple will exclude $35,000 under their current personal exempt income provisions, while the US couple would exclude no personal exemptions, other than the standard deductions after taxes are computed. Although it isn’t a strictly “apples to apples” analysis, this can be viewed as the UK couple exempting over $37,000 before calculating taxes, while the US couple gets their lower personal exemption after taxes.

    A US couple with $80,000 combined taxable income can expect to pay $9,200 (plus 10% 0f any over $80,000)

    A UK couple earning the same equivalent) top of the 20% bracket would pay $16,000, but to get to that (£57,000) level they will have excluded another untaxed $37,500 in personal allowances, making their actual taxable amount significantly lower than their income

      Even ignoring that significant consideration, let’s move on to how much of that goes to the NHS (National Health Service).  To do a realistic comparison we have to try to compare the gross incomes. Let’s take the couples we compared earlier: The UK couple actually paid $16,000 on a combined (taxable plus excluded) $117,000 in gross income. At the 4.5% rate of UK income  which goes to NHS they spend even with two kids, (as a portion of income) a combined $5265 per year for health care. That’s it, other than drug copays in some cases.

        On the other hand, the US couple (family of four) can expect (national historical average) to spend somewhere over $24,000 annually for medical expenses. As an example, the average total costs just for Massachusetts family health insurance premiums roughly tripled from 2000 to 2019, hitting $21,424 and surpassing the national cost for a new compact car! This includes employee contributions to employer provided health insurance where it exists.

        By contrast, the employer in the UK isn’t required to spend on NHS but may contribute to private health insurance and life insurance. These perks vary by employer. 11% of UK citizens buy additional private health insurance. This is generally not coverage of routine illnesses since all emergent issues are seen right away by NHS, but elective things, such as hip replacements, are sometimes subject to waiting periods of as much as 6 months (I waited 4 months in the US with Medicare and a premium health insurance supplement!) A common misconception in the U.S. is that countries with universal health care have much longer wait times. However, data from nations with universal coverage, and historical data from coverage expansion in the United States, shows that patients in other nations have similar or even shorter wait times.

        Should a UK family of four with 2 adults in their 40s and 2 kids in their teens decide to purchase private family insurance it will cost them perhaps as little as a paltry $1543 PER YEAR (and some employers may subsidize part or all of that)

        Summarizing shows that the UK does more with less, even before factoring in grossly exorbitant US drug prices. The other huge lie is the statement that Medicare for all is unaffordable. Such statements are invariably accompanied by figures such as, “Medicare spends $10,000 annually per person, and we can’t afford it.” They then usually extrapolate that figure to the entire population.  The big lie here, of course, is that for most of the population, including all adults under 65, the actual annual spending is far lower and, for children, even much lower. In fact, for the entire group ages 1 to 64, the annual national average is under $4,000!  Ask yourself this: “If Medicare is so hard pressed, why can Medicare Advantage plans make money and take just my measly monthly Medicare Social Security deduction? The simple answer is “They can’t!” But, Waldo, they don’t have to, because Medicare supplements your input by a lot, and they do it every month whether or not you use any medical care.

        In Sumter County Florida, where I live, the Medicare additional money for me (and the rest of the Medicare recipients in the county) is $907 monthly, believe it or not, if I was suffering with any of several chronic illnesses it would be significantly more. So, Medicare is sending my Medicare Advantage provider over $12,000 annually. Free Market capitalists, like John Stossel, absolutely love situations such as this. Insurance companies love it and Big Pharma absolutely adore it

On the Columbian Exchange

Note: This is about history, not the usual humor or political commentary. However, it is a field where I actually have professional credentials. So enjoy!


I have a friend who, like myself, writes the occasional essay. opinion piece or Political commentary. He is a legend in the US Marine Band community as the retired long-time guitarist with the Marine band, having played the White House far more times than I have fingers. He is also the author of one of the best moments in network TV history, (link posted at the end of this screed) that being the scene from The West Wing where the president (Martin Sheen) responds to a female “Dr Lauraesque” critic who flings scripture at him out of context. He responds with an almost verbatim recount of my friend’s letter, originally posted elsewhere. When the show aired, someone pointed out the original source of the material, and producer Aaron Sorkin, did the right thing and my friend got a sizeable check. He is also extremely detail oriented, so when I find even a small error in something he has written, you know I’m gonna tell him. Being me. I probably went into more detail than necessary but, part way in, I decided to make this an historical teaching moment for others too,

In a recent essay, my friend opined that the contact between the Americas and the rest of the world (which triggered what has come to be known as The Columbian Exchange) was probably the most significate event in recorded history. I agree with the concept but, like many of us do at times, he makes a supposition based on what many believe to be true, which is historically inaccurate. That statement in his concluding paragraph is that “Bananas, most beans, sugar cane, tobacco, cotton, and dozens of other valuable products were unknown in Europe until then.” At this point my “Bad History” alarm began ringing. And I responded:

" XXXX, I liked your piece on the Columbian exchange. I completely concur with your assessment of its impact and importance. There are a few inconsistencies however regarding the direction some crops travelled. Cane sugar, cotton and bananas were all known in Europe and had been for centuries, but there were those annoying middlemen (Italians and Arabs primarily, but also Portuguese and Spaniards) profiting from their import and sales.

Cotton has been spun, woven, and dyed since prehistoric times. It clothed the people of ancient India, Egypt, and China. Hundreds of years before the Christian era, cotton textiles were woven in India and their use spread to the Mediterranean countries.

The earliest credible evidence of coffee-drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree appears in the middle of the 15th century in the accounts of Ahmed al-Ghaffar in Yemen. It was in Arabia that coffee seeds were first roasted and brewed, in a similar way to how it is prepared now. Coffee had spread to Italy by 1600, and then to the rest of Europe, Indonesia, and the Americas. Some (not you or I) think of it as American in origin, but it isn’t.

Sugar cane was known in the fertile crescent years before the Atlantic crossing and was in fact brought to the West as was coffee, by the Spanish in some of the earliest voyages, but it was the English who really began the whole “Sugar Planter” absentee landlord, slave labor, thing later. Sugar cane was first grown extensively in medieval Southern Europe during the period of Arab rule in Sicily beginning around the 9th century. ... Crusaders brought sugar home with them to Europe after their campaigns in the Holy Land, where they encountered caravans carrying "sweet salt".

The Portuguese, like the Spanish, situated between European and Arab cultures from Africa, found lands suitable for cultivation of sugar first in the Madeira islands. Following the introduction of the first water-driven sugar mill on Madeira, sugar production rapidly increased by 1455, using advisers from Sicily and financed by Genoese capital. This also was the place where commercial, race based, Black African plantation slavery began.

The accessibility of Madeira attracted Genoese and Flemish traders, who were keen to bypass Venetian monopolies. By 1480, well before Spanish contact with the Americas, Antwerp had some seventy ships engaged in the Madeira sugar trade, with the refining and distribution concentrated in Antwerp. By the 1490s Madeira had overtaken Cyprus as a producer of sugar. Thus, Cane sugar was well known in Europe before Columbus, as was coffee, cotton and bananas.

During the medieval period, bananas from the Granada region of Spain were considered among the best in the Arab world. In 650, Islamic conquerors brought the banana to Palestine. Bananas were grown in the Christian Kingdom of Cyprus by the late medieval period. Early Spanish encounters with bananas also occurred in the Philippines. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Portuguese colonists started banana plantations in the Atlantic Islands, Brazil, and western Africa. In other words, cotton, sugar cane, bananas and coffee came west, not east.

That said, the “new” world, populated by less technologically advanced cultures was seen as a sort of “tabula rasa” for concentrated European style agriculture and production for export, bypassing the Italian links to Asian sources. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull “Dum Diversas”, which legitimized the slave trade, at least as a result of war. It granted Afonso V of Portugal the right to reduce war-conquered "Saracens, pagans and any other unbelievers" to hereditary slavery. Thus the "legitimized" possibility of free labor was added.

Additionally, the treaty of Tordesillas had divided all the “undiscovered” lands between the Portuguese and Spanish Empires, along a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands, off the west coast of Africa. This actually left all of the Americas, except the eastward projection of Brazil, under Spanish control and allowed the Spanish to treat Indigenous peoples as servants, while offering two choices, “convert to Catholicism or we can kill you with the Popes’ blessing.” This pronouncement, known as “the Requerimento” was to be read to locals, in Spanish of course, which none of them understood, sometimes even being read on board the ship before landing. The Spanish interpreted this act as Papal and Royal absolution for whatever horrors were about be inflicted on the newly minted enslaved subjects.

That aside the Spanish were really, at least initially, far more interested, initially, in precious metals than planting. The British however soon saw the opportunity for cutting out the European middleman (in the Sugar trade especially) and with the inception of race based African slavery, as a business, took brutality to greater heights in places like Barbados by the mid-1600s.

You are so right regarding corn, tomatoes, tobacco and potatoes, all of which went East and were instant hits. Oddly, enough tomatoes were initially grown only as ornamentals for several years after being introduced in Italy. I assume at one point someone tasted one and say, “Wait a minute, this would go great on pizza!”

 Note: The far more sinister aspect of all this was the microbes which carried flu, smallpox and a horde of other European communicable diseases.  Although we may never know the exact magnitudes of the depopulation, it is estimated that upwards of 80–95 percent of the Native American population was decimated within the first 100–150 years following 1492! Tainos on Hispaniola (estimates range from 80,000 to over a million were essentially extinct, and the population of central Mexico, originally estimated at 15 million, was reduced to a tenth of that.    

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CPjWd4MUXs

By any Other Name

  

      I’m going to cite a statement, the source of which I will reveal later, and posit that sadly, it could have been made at almost any time from 1865 to the present by someone somewhere in this country. The 13^th 14^th and 15th amendments to the US Constitution were all part of legislative attempts to blunt the impact of post- Civil War anti-Black sentiments in the South and assure to all Americans equal treatment under the law.         Sadly, 155 years later, we’re still laboring to a large extent under the stigma and inequalities of racially motivated discrimination and bias.

Here's the quote with the writer’s name hidden for the moment:

“XXXXXX XXXXXXX, …. infamously wrote in XXXX that, “The ‘advanced’ white race in the South is justified in taking such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically.”

        The reader might well assume that this was the former Vice-president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, who said, “Our new government ( by which he meant the Confederacy’s new constitution) is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”  However, it was not.

 

        Or one might think it was written by any of thousands of Jim Crow era terrorists reacting to passage of the Ku Klux Klan acts and vowing their determination to do whatever they could to continue white domination of Southern politics and therefore economic and social systems as well. It was not.

 

        Or it might have been a reflection by Alabama Governor George C. Wallace on his inauguration day in 1963, when he said, "In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw a line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say, segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever." (Note that the “tyranny” in question is the US Constitution and the rule of law) But it wasn’t.

        The sad thing about this statement is that it comes from an individual who was born into wealth, schooled only in private schools, at home and abroad, where he almost certainly never had a peer-to-peer relationship with any non-white individual. William F. Buckley was seen by many as the urbane, literate voice of American conservatism, and he was that. One can debate WFB’s economic and policy beliefs and find things with which to disagree and perhaps some issues on which there is concurrence,

        The underlying evil of Buckley, from my perspective, is that as the suave, urbane editor of a leading conservative news magazine, he had positional cachet, giving him almost axiomatic credibility among fellow conservatives. In truth, his racial outlook moderated somewhat towards the end of his public life, but, at a time when a Northern literate intellectual might have weighed in on the side of racial equality of treatment on the heels of Brown V, Board, in 1954, Buckley wrote this:   

        “The White South has the right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races". Buckley then said white Southerners were "entitled" to disenfranchise black voters "because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.” Buckley characterized Blacks as distinctly ignorant: "The great majority of the Negroes of the South who do not vote do not care to vote and would not know for what to vote if they could."

Note the use of the word “mores” in the above. Its usage in this context is more than “custom or tradition” and carries a tone of moral superiority as well. The great fiction here to which he apparently subscribed is that pigmentation, in and of itself, is a determinant of either intelligence or character.

By now it should be obvious that we are seeing the same actions Buckley sanctions and approves (voter suppression) being taken simply because Southern Whites simply cannot accept that they might not be the dominant political force in the region. Buckley would have understood and said so, 64 years ago. That he was a Yale educated individual with zero personal frame of reference just makes it harder to grasp. What it does do, however, is take the mask off Northern conservatives who, while never issuing specific racist statements, remain strangely silent when others of their party, by act, word, or political initiative, do so. It isn’t new, it’s just disheartening.    

"You Just Say It!"

 

     I once had a student remark after a class, when we had discussed difficulties experienced in second language learning (for reasons I have long forgottten),  that he, "Didn't see why learning English was so hard." His simplistic reason was that, he said, "You just say it."   Yes, really, he said that. When last I saw him he was a counter man at a mall pizza joint. The following is more of a riff on the "oddities" of English which might seem opaque to non native speakers.          

        Listen to any type of verbal media for even a small amount of time and you are sure to hear any number of reasons why English is a difficult language for some non-native speakers to learn, especially for those whose native tongue is fairly literal and spelling reasonably straight forward.  Because of the olla podrida, stemming from various origins, into which English has evolved, we tend to find terms and combinations which, while the colloquial meaning may be (but isn't always) apparent, the origins are murky.

        Easy example. My computer has on occasion been "out of whack" or "out of kilter." But, can an object be "in whack?" or even "in kilter?"

        As generally used, we know what we mean but a learner might struggle with: Where is whack (or kilter)? Is it a commodity, such that, if I have none I can be out of it? It is a state of being? Why, if my car is out of kilter, can't I get it repaired and back "in kilter"?  As it turns out, change the spelling to "kelter" which meant "good order or health" in the 17th century, and it makes sense.

        I’ve frequently been characterized as nonchalant, and I know what that means, but, on a rare bad day when I might be “chalant”, how the hell am I supposed to act? Likewise, must I have been “calcitrant” on some prior occasion before I can become recalcitrant?  

        What might I get for my money it I approached a certain street vendor and ordered a "hot diggety dog?"  Hot, I'm pretty sure would still mean hot, but that diggety stuff scares me! Perhaps, like baluts, (chicken or duck eggs with 18-20 day embryos) which are buried at times by Filipinos until "ripe" for eating), "diggety dogs" are stored underground until "adequately ripe."  Don't know, don't wanna know.    

        My grandmother used to describe anything that wasn't even or level as either "cattywampus" or "sowickered" when she really meant they were "out of kilter". Go figure. Cattywampus always sounded to me like a broom one might use to "shoo" a cat.  The origins are lost, but best guess is that it comes from "quatre" as in French for "four" referring to four corners, or square. Sowickered? I got nuthin'.

One word which I find particularly evocative in meaning is the South Carolina euphemism for vomit - "cascade."  This, defecation, and masturbation may be the three words with the largest number of referential and euphemistic aliases. I'll leave the other two alone, but in addition to the beautiful mountain stream image created by "cascade" my personal top ten include:

1) barfing

2) visual burp

3) blowing chunks

4) talking to Ralph on the big white telephone

5) yakking

6) to tumble groceries    

7) the liquid laugh

8) yawning in Technicolor

9) revisiting lunch

10) a tie between "3d shouting" and "chowder gargling"

A double honorable mention goes to:  "Induce an involuntary personal protein spill" (credit George Carlin), and from Men at Work, in  their song “Land Down Under”, the word “chunder”, meaning barf, etc.

I know we all have our faves, but these are mine.

        I'll leave you with several terms from our friends in the UK, which I guarantee would leave a non-native speaker in the dust. The first two are more Irish:

        "Take the piss."  I know, sounds straightforward, like maybe you might do it in the loo? Not so fast my non-Anglophilic friend; it actually means to make fun of, tease or take advantage of a person, as in "are you serious or just taking the piss?" This one actually shows up in Brit (and sometimes Aussie) network TV dialogue occasionally.

        The other, similar sounding in origin, but not meaning, is "Dry Shite."  Again, we might think we have a feel for the meaning and the posterior discomfort it implies, but not so much.  It means " boring" or, if leveled at someone, as calling them a bore. In usage:  Collum could either BE a "dry shite" or what he was speaking about was "dry shite."

        "Bob's your uncle," meaning "things are fine, or optimum." Its roots go back 1887 when British Prime Minister Robert Gascoyne-Cecil appointed his nephew Arthur James Balfour as Minister for Ireland, a post for which he was underprepared. The phrase 'Bob's your uncle' was coined when Arthur referred to the Prime Minister as 'Uncle Bob'. Apparently, it's very simple to become a minister when Bob's your uncle (or if your name is Trump) So, if Bob was/is your uncle, you’re doing fine.

A similar phrase in meaning is describing anything which is working well as being "Tickety- Boo".  This probably came back from India with the British army.  A common Hindi phrase “tikai babu,” which translates as “it’s all right, sir” became Tickety-Boo in English.

        Let’s finish with one derived from rhyming slang, (of which there is a lot) and absolutely undecipherable if you don't know already. "Have a butcher's" comes from Cockney rhyming slang. Back in the day, butcher shops hung meat on hooks as display. "Hook" is a sound alike for "look" so "have a butcher's" means to “have (or take) a look.” There are literally well over a hundred such Brit rhyme-based slang terms. A couple of final examples: Raspberry tart, Vera Lynn, Elephant’s Trunk, and Baked Bean, mean in the same order, “fart”, “gin”, “drunk”, and “queen.”   

Hope this helps all my non-English speaking readers