Our Next President?

[jk]

Re: Our Next President?

we're already spending a ton of money on less than world-class care. we don't need to spend more than we're spending, we need to spend it smarter. so there's no extra spending needed. it's just a question of how the money goes 'round. the reason business owners oppose universal healthcare is that they figure it means they're going to have to pay higher taxes. but the reality is it makes u.s. businesses more competitive. a canadian company doesn't have to worry about funding its healthcare. a u.s. company does. there is no problem in paying for universal healthcare, the only problem is how to distribute the pain of paying for it.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Our Next President?

Yeah, this is an interesting one where you have more or less broad bipartisan agreement, and yet they cannot seem to get it done.

[vt]

Re: Our Next President?

I agree with JK that the best use would be to rebuild the infrastructure.

That's would create a lot of high paying jobs and be a real boost for the middle class.

Plus if we don't fix crumbling water and sewer systems, bridges, and other critical parts of the infrastructure the bill will be much higher later.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Our Next President?

On every level. Not having to pay huge money. Not having to waste time with open enrollment every year. Not having to waste time with insurance salesmen. Not having employees so scared of deductibles they wait too long for treatment and miss work. All the trillions in wasted overhead and admin costs. It's not like the big boys don't realize this; they have employees in other countries. But still they're dead set against it, and they've geared up the US chamber to make Medicare for All public enemy number 1. I think the real fear is personal, not business. Even if it would be better for business, the idea of not having preferential access is the real fear that keeps the fight alive. Shit like concierge medicine, and this. The prospect of losing that horrifies them. My friends who are nurses in Boston have told some amazing stories about the stops that get pulled out for Mid East princelings. Like special treatment an order of magnitude better than this. But mis-triaging like that is only possible in a very corrupt and broken system that has no ethical foundation.

[Morgasbord]

Re: Our Next President?

The truly maddening thing is universal health care would be SO GOOD for business owners, large and small.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Our Next President?

I haven't drunk the koolaid, and I still say ditch paygo and fund a healthcare system that doesn't suck. Debt might cause real constraints down the road. But I refuse to believe that it's possible to have a public healthcare system more wasteful and inefficient and with worse outcomes than we have in the US today. And paygo is just stupid for Democrats without a corresponding Republican 'cutgo.' Seems baldly on the face stupid to me that one side has a rule against spending without raising revenue while the other side doesn't have a corresponding rule about cutting revenue without cutting spending. Why kneecap your own party like that?

You don't have to believe a damned thing about MMT to think that 1) America has the most expensive, worst designed, and least moral healthcare system in the developed world, or that, 2) the Democrats are strategically handicapping themselves by self-imposing paygo. In fact, I'd suggest that both of these things are plainly true to anybody examining the evidence, regardless of proclivities toward one economic theory or another.

(PS the thing called 'cutgo' where they pledge to cut mandatory spending for increases in discretionary is not what I'm talking about, that's just robbing grandma to pay boeing)

[Morgasbord]

Re: Our Next President?

ok, candidates talking about national debt. the deficit. oh noes! I alluded to it earlier, maybe it should be a separate thread, but can we talk about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)? I've drank of the koolaid, and now all talk of national debt makes my eyes roll.

Federal debt. Who is it owed to? how is it paid? what are federal taxes for?

This article goes into the thinking driving Bernie and AOC's views on spending, and the progressive caucus are correspondingly getting increasingly annoyed with the centrist camp of paygo rules and narrative framing of the federal deficit.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01...netary-theory/

Why, exactly, can we not deficit spend to marshall real resources to provide medicare for all, and re-tool our infrastructure, but we can spend on the military just fine? Deficit spending only matters in as much as it leads to inflation in the sector you are spending in, at least according to MMT. Republicans seem to get this, but keep it on the down low.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Our Next President?

Oh, no, I didn't get that impression. It's just what popped in my head.

[jk]

Re: Our Next President?

here's a little info re eliz warren's proposal:
The plan, which would impose an annual 2 percent wealth tax on fortunes greater than $50 million and a 3 percent tax on ones greater than $1 billion,

[jk]

Re: Our Next President?

But now you really come to the central issue. My view is that 50 years ago the majority of base, grass roots investment, into the entire industrial base of the Western economies, (not just the US), came from the excess funds held by the successful; that first stage investment into all those millions of tiny start up businesses, came from the concept that it was a duty of those holding spare cash; to invest into their nation.

Not a sign of anything like that today. Now, everyone wants to be in on the very best chance of adding to that wealth; with no consideration of the long term effects upon the base of the economy.

Here in the UK there is a historical record from the 19th century of the investors in a tunnel under the Thames river in London, having a dinner party in the tunnel; they were not anyone we might today call the .1%; they were just people that invested. Again, the Eiffel Tower in Paris was built with funds raised from investors. Not hedge funds, not venture capitalists, no bank in sight; just small investors.

When we describe the .1% no one takes account of the lost investment.

with slack demand no one wants to build capacity. the trillion dollar tax cut, mostly for corporations, has spurred NO increase in capital spending and NO increase in wages. it all went into stock buybacks to goose executive bonuses and make the wealthy wealthier.

so excess funds just go sloshing around the financial markets and mostly don't make it into the real economy at all.

[Chris Coles]

Re: bureaucratic overhead

Yeah, I think you're onto something with this idea for the US too. It's not just the random desire to use GDP as a political yardstick. It's actually part of the policy rule-kit now. Congressional Budget Office scoring that's mandated for certain bills and certain Senate maneuvers to drop voting thresholds from 60 to 50+ votes are hitched to GDP measures. So the system for passing legislation is hard wired to GDP in that way. The there are the additional rules, like paygo, that Congress imposes upon itself that combine with the GDP scoring to actually prevent them from ever doing anything transformative that really makes a big impact on GDP. So they can't take up bills that would spend enough to really jam the growth lever up to 6% like back in the 1960s or something. But they also can't do anything that CBO projections say would lower it off the 2% growth baseline too much. And of course, this was not true just a short decades ago. But now every 10 year period pretty much has to average between 1 and 3% GDP growth, or you're violating one rule or another in Congress. This is also partly why they've had such a damned horrific time actually passing serious infrastructure bills, even if both Obama and Trump say they wanted it.

But even on a second level, it occurs that if you're measuring GDP so carefully, and you have free trade agreements designed to ship all the manufacturing jobs overseas to lower-labor-cost jurisdictions, and you simultaneously have an international myth that manufacturing isn't important anymore and the developed world has moved beyond it into a new historical era called the 'service economy,' then you desperately have to find ways to get things that were happening anyways onto the books to keep up the figures. So you make work. Not only with the Graeber style Bullshit Jobs thing. But by commercializing parts of life that were not commercialized before. As I was going on before, rent a room to a stranger on AirBnB and use the money to hire a home health care aide, and you're creating a lot of GDP. Have a friend move in for free who also helps out around the house as a friend, and you're creating zero GDP. The same amount of work is being done either way. But one generates a ton of tax revenue and official statistical economic activity. The other generates none of that, but creates a real human bond between people who actually care about each other instead. So everything must be bent towards incentivizing the first arrangment and discouraging the latter. This is a big reason why Putnam found all the stuff in Bowling Alone that he found, I think. "The service economy" is really just the commercialization of previously non-commercial human interactions. It's the "marketization" of life. Manufacturing hasn't become any less important. The economy hasn't moved beyond it. Try getting through a day without any manufactured goods. It's just where manufacturing is done and what people are paid to do it has changed dramatically. So in lieu of these types of jobs, as you say, we've got to convolute and commercialize things.

And this has further implications too--notice how, on this side of the pond at least, the corporate rates and the share of total revenue generated by corporate taxation is way, way down. The top marginal rates too and the share generated by the top 0.1% is way, way down too. Just compared to 5 years ago it's down. Compared to 15 more so. Compared to 30 even more so, etc. Since Reagan, and I'm guessing since Thatcher over there. And this isn't even considering the tax revenue lost to offshoring. Imagine if iPhones were manufactured in Los Angeles instead of in Shenzhen. That'd be what? 350,000 jobs? Even at LA minimum wage, it'd be $25,000 per year per job, assuming they only pay 5% income tax on that (an unlikely low number, but possible), that's about $4.5 billion in annual tax revenue. At a minimum. If everyone made the lowest legal wage and paid the lowest tax share they could. That's not counting state taxes. That's not counting the Social Security Trust Fund payroll taxes. It's not counting Medicare contributions for 65+ healthcare. That would all add up to much more. $25 billion per year wouldn't be out of the question when it's all said and done. Of course, with a company as big as Apple, that's what? 9% of their revenue or something? So that sounds about right for back of the envelope guesswork to me, since it'd clearly force a significant price increase for the knick knacks and doo dads. But when you add it all up, it's a whole lot of tax revenue lost. Government gives up a ton of revenue by allowing extremely low corporate tax rates and top marginal rates in conjunction with frictionless offshoring of manufacturing jobs. If they don't change laws to promote "the service economy" and promote commercializing previously non-commercial activity, and if them and the private sector don't engage in make-work schemes full of infographics and grant competitions, etc, then how the hell else would anything work? If you were focused on GDP, it certainly wouldn't.

And we all know what happened to Robert Kennedy.....

Again, I will argue that you may not be accurate when describing minimum wages; these boosts to GDP here in the UK involve as many as possible high level wage earners being added to the likes of the NHS. Indeed, you yourself described high cost wage earners in schools.

Apart from that, yes, we are on the same page; the drive to increase GDP is the primer of choice for any increase in economic output. Too much of a supposedly good thing will, inevitable, come back to haunt all of us.

And then I remembered how Henry Ford paid all his workers high wages so they could afford to buy his cars. We are turning full circle.

[Chris Coles]

Re: Our Next President?

yep, there it is. thanks for finding it.
looking for the cumulative wealth of the top 0.1%. the top TWENTY INDIVIDUALS had, in 2017, wealth equal to a trillion dollars. to be in the top 0.1% you need a minimum net worth of $43million. as a group, the top 0.1% own 22% of ALL the wealth in this country. [not sure about how their international holdings are counted, or if that statistic means 22% of all the wealth owned by u.s. citizens].

so here's another factoid:
The financial position of the United States includes assets of at least $269.6 trillion (1576% of GDP) and debts of $145.8 trillion (852% of GDP) to produce a net worth of at least $123.8 trillion (723% of GDP) as of Q1 2014.


so let's estimate that the top 0.1% are worth around $25trillion. [remember, just the top 20 individuals are worth a trillion. and that's a 2014 number, and we know what asset prices have done since then.] so if warren is looking for $3 trillion is that per year, or over 10 years? [these kinds of statements are often a 10year number.] if it's over 10 years we're talking about a little over a 1% tax if assets were at the 2014 level. the tax would be significantly lower based on 2019 values.

it's hard to call a property tax of less than 1% confiscatory.

But now you really come to the central issue. My view is that 50 years ago the majority of base, grass roots investment, into the entire industrial base of the Western economies, (not just the US), came from the excess funds held by the successful; that first stage investment into all those millions of tiny start up businesses, came from the concept that it was a duty of those holding spare cash; to invest into their nation.

Not a sign of anything like that today. Now, everyone wants to be in on the very best chance of adding to that wealth; with no consideration of the long term effects upon the base of the economy.

Here in the UK there is a historical record from the 19th century of the investors in a tunnel under the Thames river in London, having a dinner party in the tunnel; they were not anyone we might today call the .1%; they were just people that invested. Again, the Eiffel Tower in Paris was built with funds raised from investors. Not hedge funds, not venture capitalists, no bank in sight; just small investors.

When we describe the .1% no one takes account of the lost investment.

[jk]

Re: Our Next President?

It's not hard at all.
You start by calling all taxes theft. Then convince millions of wage earners that such a tax would destroy the economy and throw them out of work.
Repeat it endlessly and millions of people come to believe it is true.
It has worked like a charm for 30 years and counting.

of course you're correct. otoh, if you say you're going to spend the $3 trillion on e.g. infrastructure people know you'll be creating a lot of jobs.

[Chris Coles]

Re: Our Next President?

It's not hard at all.
You start by calling all taxes theft. Then convince millions of wage earners that such a tax would destroy the economy and throw them out of work.
Repeat it endlessly and millions of people come to believe it is true.
It has worked like a charm for 30 years and counting.

Spot on!

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Our Next President?

...it's hard to call a property tax of less than 1% confiscatory.

It's not hard at all.
You start by calling all taxes theft. Then convince millions of wage earners that such a tax would destroy the economy and throw them out of work.
Repeat it endlessly and millions of people come to believe it is true.
It has worked like a charm for 30 years and counting.