that isn't really accurate. you are depicting a gap in revenue due to a rate cut that must be made up by cutting spending on medicare. putting aside for the moment that you could just as easily offer to "cut" cowboy poetry festivals and the like with that "reduction in revenue" (and that therefore the argument is specious), whether or not we actually see losses to revenue from rate cuts (especially over time) is an open question, and history seems to indicate precisely the opposite.
Yeah. There are three possible ways we can pay for the tax breaks for the rich. We can undo them, we can increase the debt or we can cut spending. The first one is the only one that doesn't hurt middle class folks for the benefit of the rich.
which they will continue to do under our current model which utilizes the worst of both words and depends for its' financing on that third form of financing I described - spending other people's money on yourself. however you want to describe it, the fact remains - Medicare will not survive in its' current form.
there is one portion of Medicare that has managed to keep it's annual inflation to around 1.2%..... and that is Medicare Part D. Which operates similarly to premium support in that it utilizes competition in order to do so.
that's not the President's plan, mind you. The President's plan is to start cutting availability and care by reducing the number of providers. Now, that works as an expenditure cutting mechanism - but at a high human cost.
I agree that prices will keep going up under the compromise plan we have in effect today, but the core of the president's proposal was to increase competition and the number of providers by adding a public option. The root problem appears to be that the major insurance companies aren't competing on price. It's an industry that it requires 10s maybe even 100s of billions to get started in, so they know that as long as they work together they can keep raising prices and no new players are going to jump in. That's why they charge us 2, 3, even 8 times as much as they charge people in other countries for the same products and services- because in other countries they have to compete with a public option or negotiate with a single payer that has radically more leverage than a bunch of uncoordinated individuals. As tired as everybody is of the health care debate, that needs to be the main thrust of Obama's second term as well. We can't stop until we get at least a public option or prices will continue shooting up.
in fact, when you ask which industries have higher profit margins than health insurance in the United States of America, the answer is
83 of them. with a profit margin of 3.3%.
Two things on that. First, while profit taking is one reason for the prices going up, it isn't the only reason. A lack of price pressure means they become less efficient too. But, second, those profit statistics are a scam. Health insurance companies have to hold massive amounts of money in the stock market at all times so that they can be sure that they can pay off any bills that they have committed to. During the Bush recession they lost billions and billions in the market. Those profit margins are the amount of profit they made in those years after covering all their investment losses.
ah. well then worry no more - because taking less away from one person and giving less to another is precisely the opposite of the definition of redistribution of wealth. (whew!), glad we could get that monkey off your back. :-D
Say, for example, that the government passed a law tomorrow saying "teamosil no longer needs to pay taxes and we are cancelling cpwill's social security". Is that not a redistribution of wealth from you to me?
it's not a moral standard - it's an objective one. Not taking from someone is not the same as giving to them
Still just semantics. What words you print on the check you send them doesn't matter. It has exactly the same effects- more money in their pocket, more government debt. The people involved all have exactly the same interests in it... There is no practical difference. It's just a rhetorical difference. Maybe if you gave a tax cut to every person equally or something that would be different than giving an entitlement to individual people, but that isn't what we have here. They are saying- person A gets a tax break and person B does not and we will cut spending that affects person B, but does not affect person A.
when in trouble deny all reality?
Deny all reality? You're attempting to show that one variable has a particular relationship to another without controlling for all the other variables. That's just bad logic. It's like trying to figure out what impact the length of a person's hair has by charting the salaries and hair lengths of a 19 year old girl with long hair that works at a super market against a 60 year old CEO with short hair... The noise overwhelms the signal. You need to control for at the very least the dozen or so other massive variables before you could possibly draw any conclusions on the relationship between tax rate and revenue. Economists do that all the time and while they differ on the details, they all agree that there is an optimal tax rate. Go above that and the economic impacts outweigh the higher percentage. Go below that and the low percentage outweighs the economic impacts. If you're just looking for a binary "lower taxes better" sort of position, it doesn't exist. My contention is that taxes were generally too high from the 40s up until the 70s. We hit the sweet spot somewhere in the 80s or 90s. Then we went too far in the 2000s and our deficit exploded while our economy collapsed.
if the government were better at allocating resources than the private sector, then government allocation of resources would have succeeded.
Again, this is binary thinking. There are some problems that the private sector is better at addressing and some that the public sector is better at addressing. The private sector is great at making the best goods at the lowest cost if the market is functioning properly. But it doesn't account for externalities at all. For addressing problems involving externalities you need government.
those figures are k-12. ;-)
Right, but where in the 70s they were more preparing people to go into entry level jobs in K-12, now we are preparing them to go on to higher learning. That's a much bigger challenge.
that is incorrect -those are against a fairly stable standard model. Todays students are in many ways worse off than students of the 1960's.
one third of college freshmen have to remediate high school.
Not sure how you think that shows that students are worse off now. College gets harder and more complex all the time too.
meanwhile,
the story is the same in the states. More Spending =/= Better Academic Performance.
Again, you aren't controlling for other variables.
every country is spending more?
I said that every country is spending more now than they did in the 70s, not that every country is spending more than the US does.
bloc-granting education dollars from the Federal government would have the effect of allowing the states to experiment and the winning systems would become obvious.
I'm against Bush's no child left behind. It's ludicrously simpleminded and causes all kinds of problems as a result. That said, we know what happens when states experiment with a totally free hand on education- education in red states collapses.
in terms of measuring GDP, 100 man hours spent replacing functional windows with eco-windows rather than making widgets is 100 hours wasted.
Of course not. That means less money blown on energy, it means lower energy costs for everybody, it means less pollution which can be very costly, less global warming, etc. A penny saved is a penny earned.
if they were in the net habit of putting money in companies that do poorly, they wouldn't be millionaires - generally they put money into their own businesses.
but your model is flawed as well - you brought up the example of Amazon, which didn't turn a profit until... what, 2001, 2002? Yet it's sales skyrocketed as it made those losses.
Not sure what you think that shows. Ultimately our economy needs both investment and consumer spending. Investment enables companies to grow faster than their revenues would allow, which is often a good thing. For example, it would be almost impossible to do long term commercial scientific research if nobody was willing to invest the money up front. But, ultimately, companies that don't make actual revenues collapse. We need to be striving to find the right balance between stimulating investment (giving the money to the rich) and stimulating consumer spending (giving the money to people who work). When you error too far in the side of consumer spending you tend to get "stagflation" like we had under Carter. When you error too far on the side of investment, you get bubbles. Investment money floods in causing companies to be overvalued, but ultimately they can't produce the actual revenues to justify those values and the bubble bursts. You tell me, which have we been experiencing the past 11 years?
no, it's not. Jobs are a means, not an end in themselves.
so your argument is that a business can hire more people with $80 than it can with $1000?
I think you're missing something here. Scenario one- an investor invests $1m, in a company. They use it to expand their operation. They hire 10 people and buy 5 more machines. Scenario two- consumers spend $1m at a company. It needs to hire 10 people and buy 5 more machines with that money to satisfy the demand.
it may not be as large as you would like, but larger (and thereby progressive) it remains - meaning that we have effectively reached a method that meets both sides primary goals.
The goal isn't just to be able to say "hey, we technically have progressive taxation"... The goal is to actually have meaningful progressive taxation so that we're more efficiently distributing costs given the diminishing marginal utility curve. The optimal solution would be for taxes to progress at about the same pace as the utility of that money diminishes. Having a system that is flat above $20k isn't really any closer to that goal than one that is flat all the way up. At least not enough closer to warrant mention.