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Politics and Economics
To be bankrupt is to owe more than you can possibly pay. Which translates to irredeemable, as in rotten to the core. In politics, that translates to “I refuse to engage the other side, because they have the wrong values.” In other words, the Other Side cares about the wrong things.
Fraud and waste is why US healthcare is so damn expensive. An estimated 10% of Medicare/Medicaid is lost to fraud. As for waste, at least 20% of US healthcare spending is unnecessary due to…Imagine if the US cut healthcare spending by a quarter. That would shave off almost a trillion dollars - enough to fund a healthcare system where everyone is covered and everyone’s paying less. All it takes is political will, including a willingness to face down the AMA.
The other countries [like Denmark] have broad-based tax systems. Not only does the bottom 90% pay more income tax, they also pay higher consumption taxes, which tend to be regressive...Broad-based tax systems operate on the principle that everyone contributes to the common good. We’re all in this together. Sure, those at the top should pay more, but the idea is that everybody pitches in. That attitude encourages a collective problem-solving approach to government policy. More pragmatism, less ideology. More “us”, less “us versus them”.
As far as government policy goes, whatever works is fine with me. I don’t care if the boosters for a particular policy are in it only for the money, that they’re solely motivated by self-interest, greed, political advancement, salvation, selfless devotion to the common good, or pure compassion. Good people have bad ideas. Bad people have good ideas. The proof is in the pudding.
But how do the Europeans do it? They’re not squeezing the rich much more than we do - and yet they have generous social benefits and universal healthcare! The answer’s pretty obvious…
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently floated a marginal tax rate of 70 percent on income over $10 million. The idea is to reduce inequality via redistribution via higher tax revenue….This chart actually explains why there is such income volatility among richest US households: much of their income comes from selling capital assets, such as a business or shares in a mutual fund. These are often one-off affairs and not a steady source of revenue. Thus it’s no surprise that roughly half the households that manage to earn at least a million only do so for a year. In other words, there’s a lot of churn at the top.
Elizabeth Warren recently unveiled a plan to impose a 2% tax on households with net assets worth more than $50 million and a 3% tax on households with assets worth more than $1 billion…Numerous commentators have noted that wealth taxes have fallen out of favor over the last few decades. Austria, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Luxembourg, and Sweden have all abolished their wealth tax since 1990. The main reason is that the tax was hard to administer and failed to generate much money. As a recent OECD report put it…
Industry: “Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.” Ben Franklin Self-Reliance: “Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.” Thomas Jefferson
…in Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Robert Sapolsky concludes a discussion of MFT with the claim that “…conservatives heavily value loyalty, authority, and sanctity.”
In 1994, young adults were more conservative and less liberal than old people. In 2014, it was just the opposite. What happened?
So what is the relationship between inequality, social mobility, and household income?
When people think about how they are “doing”, what is their reference point? Partly their earlier selves, partly people in their social network, and partly people they simply come in contact with at work and in the neighborhood. If they’re going to compare themselves with their parents, they adjust for age: how the parents were doing at their current age. Given that income and wealth peak later in life, the comparison isn’t really compelling until later in life.
“…a four-year old’s openness to a new toy predicts how open she’ll be as an adult to, say, the US forging new relations with Iran and Cuba.” — Robert Sapolsky (2017) Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
What I see here is that the two conservative groups have done rather well, despite their limited education. It makes sense to me that they believe most people can get ahead if they work hard - because, for the most part, that’s how it worked out for them. Is that “system justification”, or simply believing in the system upon the evidence of their own lives?
Unfortunately, cheaper drugs and administration would not come even close to paying for Sanders’ Medicare-for-all plan. That’s because the high cost of US healthcare is driven by over-testing, over-treatment, overpriced procedures, and overpaid doctors. Check it out:
Why is it is so much easier to commit fraud against Medicare than against private insurance companies? Partly because the Medicare billing system is easy to game (see, for instance, “upcoding” and “inflated risk scores”) and partly because Medicare doesn’t require preauthorization as a condition of payment…
But what about those high administrative costs? According to The Commonwealth Fund, the share of hospital costs devoted to administration is 25% in the US, compared to 20% in The Netherlands, 16% in England, and just 12% in Canada. That sounds pretty damning, but it’s important to remember that administrative costs are often unrelated to insurance matters or are dual-purpose.
We want the pharma wolf to be healthy - not fat and not lean. Robust enough to survive inevitable dips in revenue. So how much could the US cut drug prices without undermining ongoing innovation in the industry?
Most Americans support “Medicare-for-all”, at least when described very broadly as "a publicly financed, privately delivered system with all Americans enrolled and all medically necessary services covered." But would they support Bernie Sander’s Medicare-for-all plan if well-informed of its details? Let’s look at some of those details, starting with what would be covered and how costs would be controlled. This straight from Bernie's online description…
Subprime loans did not become a significant part of the mortgage market until the 1990s. They were just 8% of the market in 2002….However, subprime mortgages did rise to about 20% of new home loans by 2006. How many of these were the result of predatory practices?