Everyone should be in favor of reducing taxes on the "rich"

[Zoomie1980]

There's plenty of money in the monied classes to invest.




Nice try , but I'm not buying it.

When we cut taxes on the very welathy, they have all sorts of money to invest and so they do...and then what happens?

financial Bubbles happen, that's what happens.

There's a whole LOT of investment capital chasing too few profits, that's what happens. In other words, all that spare capital ends up INFLATING THE COST OF INVESTMENTS beyond their potential worth.



Yeah, we're aalready like the most productive society on earth precsiely because we are the most captialized nation on earth (more dollars invested per worker than anyplace I know of), we're awash with STUFF already and you really think that we need more capital investment chasing the same investments that aren't making enough money because the consumer class is going broke?

THIS is the best a Doctor of Economics can come up with...a rehash of the failed trickledown theory?

Does this clown not know his history? does he not know that trickle down economic keeps failing? It failed in the late 19th century, it failed in the early twentieth century, the late 20th century, and it wil fail again in the early 21st century, too.

Too much investment capital, taken from the consumer classes, inevitably leads to the same thing over and over and over again.

It causes bubbles in markets which pop!, and then we suffer a period of slowed economic activity.

The problem isn't that the rich don't have enough capital, it's that our economy is drive by consumerism, ye over educated but apparently not very well ninny!




Finally, a glimmer of sense! Yes, cutting taxes without cutting expenses is ANOTHER EVEN WORSE KIND of mistake our Republican chumsn ahve been making for the last two decades.



Partial credit. Given the idiocy of the way we do FREE TRADE, higher taxes DO drive industry out of the nation, I quite agree.



None of us really have a clue what a free market cpaitalist society would look like.

I suspect it would look like a lot like Somalia, but hey, I could be wrong. It might look like utopia...for about three people or so.

George Reisman, Ph.D., is Pepperdine University Professor Emeritus of Economics. His web site is Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics. His blog is at George Reisman's Blog on Economics, Politics, Society, and Culture.

[/QUOTE]

Nothing "trickle-down". It is simply fundamental Economics 101. About as basic and simple as it gets.

 

[Zoomie1980]

Noooooo.... no way.. .trying to bring in communist redistribution in??/

No, I'm merely trying to alert you to the reality that the people with the money are the only damned people capable of carring the weight of the government...the government they have bought lock stock and barrel in Congress.

You start out demanding something ridiculous, my response is we can have the ridiculous the moment we do something ridiculous to make it possible.

Demanding the same rate of taxes on each income earner is simple absurd.




Tell it to the Kennedies, the Rockefellers, and so forth. They might buy into your dream world delusions about making it in America, sport. Nobody gets to pick out where they start from, champ.



I can't take credit, really. Reality based thinking is just a knack of mine. You should try it some time. It's easy if you take off those libertopian blinders you're wearing.



My mistake? What does any of the above have to do with anything I've written in this thread? Nothing.

Trying reading what I write instead of responding to the voices inside your libertopeian-adled brain.



We are not created equal, don't be such a damned fool. Do you really think you're EQUAL to a drooling imbecile?

More to the point, are you trying to tell me that a kid starting out today with nothing, coming from a crappy school system, has the same opportunities to happiness as some well heeled scion graduating Choate with a legacy admission to Yale?

What planet do you live on, anyway?

Again for the ignorant, uneducated and/or poorly informed. Yes we have some Kennedy's and Rockefeller's in this country but they make up and INFINITESIMALLY SMALL percentage of the "rich". 90%+ of the "rich" (net worth's over a million) are FIRST GENERATION wealth....people who made it THEMSELVES, using intelligence and hard work.

If you are poor in this country you have NO ONE to blame but YOURSELF, and you DESERVE to have the life YOU HAVE CHOSEN.

 

[Zoomie1980]

More to the point, are you trying to tell me that a kid starting out today with nothing, coming from a crappy school system, has the same opportunities to happiness as some well heeled scion graduating Choate with a legacy admission to Yale?

Actually, yes. Or pretty damned close. I am quite wealthy, a product of a marginal school district, son of a hairdresser and a used car salesman. My wife is the daughter of a share cropper. I am the NORM not the exception. We took advantages of the opportunities we had, got college degrees in something we could actually make money at, continued to improve ourselves after college and now, in our 50's we are very well situated and we EARNED IT all by OURSELVES.

And we are the NORMAL story of success in the US, we did not inherit anything, we did ourselves and so can anyone else in this country REGARDLESS of circumstance....IF....they want to.

 

[Zoomie1980]

Take your complaint to the shoulders of Bell Labs and every other robber baron class that functioned to the detriment of everyone else. Like I said, if you don't like it, take your ass to Dubai. Indeed, your complaint of "marxist crap" just doesn't ring too loudly while we live through the fruits of failed free market capitalism. Im all for personal responsibility... But I'm also for not allowing the wealthy class to use the rest of us like a vampire uses villagers in the night. Dont like it? vote. If you lose? Tough shit.

No, you take it to North Korea or Vietnam where you would like it very much.

This populist nonsense has NEVER worked in this country and never will. The vast majority of middle america has NO stomach for socialistic idiocy and will NEVER allow it to happen no matter how many kool-aide San Fransiscans or Latte drinking intellectuals in Soho may like it to. The country will NEVER be a Western Europe, we will ALWAYS be a largely supply-side economy as we have been now for much of the past 40 years...

SO it is you who should probably consider leaving because neither McCain nor Obama is going to change anything much at all just as neither Clinton nor Bush did.

 

[BaronVonBigmeat]

For the most part, they pretty much do. Almost ALL (over 90%) of household's with net worth's over $1,000,000 started life as middle class or lower. Less than 10% of the "wealthy" in this country is "old money".

Another point worth mentioning: the lion's share of new jobs are created by small businesses. Something like 75%~80%. When you tax the "rich", you are essentially taxing successful small businessmen.

Incidentally, who often ends up taking down huge seemingly invincible corporations? If you said small innovative businesses flying under the radar, you're right.

 

[chapstic]

If you are of sound mind and body and a citizen of the United States, and you are poor, it is because you have CHOSEN to be so....

exactly. there is so much oppurtunity in this country that if you work hard you will be well rewarded. if you are poor and still have the mobility to get to the mailbox every week, get an f'ing job(and quit bitching).

i'm so sick of my tax dollars going to people who don't even try to be prosperous to our society. people who work for their money shouldn't have to give it to people who do not work because they are lazy.

 

[Skull Pilot]

everyone should be in favor of lower taxes for everyone and smaller less intrusive government. Ahhh Nirvana. But wake up. it's never going to happen.

there will always be those who think that giving the government $10 to get 50 cents worth of services is a good deal especially if the money comes from "the rich". while in reality anyone with an income will pay.

Personally, I'd rather give the government 50 cents and keep the $9.50 change but alas the government will never reduce spending, will never get smaller unless we do something drastic and once again that will never happen.

jaded and cynical aren't I? or am I just realistic?

Hopefully I'll be dead before we are all paying 90% of our income in taxes.

Might as well drink

View attachment 5752

 

[editec]

There is no such thing as "trickle down economics". This is just plain old economics.

Oh poppycock and you know it.

There are supply siders whose every kneejerk response is to give tax breaks and incentives to the monied classes, and every time they bring this up they talk about how having a monied class well greased with investment capital inevitably works to everyones advantage because their investments "tickle down" to the little people.

You are now attempting to deny the basic theme (termed tickle down economics) of supply siders of which you are obviously one.

Businesses need to invest in themselves to remain competitive. I work for a manufacturing company which could really stand to buy some better equipment and software. Management recognizes the benefit, but it's just not in the budget.

No shit. The question is how much money do the rich need, not do they need to be rich at all?

Please refrain from trying to rewrite my position into something it's not, just so that you can fault me for things I do not believe.

And as he said, we really didn't see the benefits of tax cuts in the last 25 years or so, because we didn't cut spending.

Nice half truth.

True we did not cut spending.

Our government spend such that the wealthy make even more money sucking off the government teat, sport.

The middle class paid for the social security as they went, so tallying that to the debt problem is either mendacious, or simply wrong out of ignorance.

But either way, it's wrong

We traded a tax burden for a borrowing/inflation burden, mainly in order to build up the military starting in the 80's, unfortunately.

Not exactly.

The WEALTHY who control our government traded a cut in their share of the tax burden.

Every poll of the middle class proves that most of US would rather the government pay DOWN the national debt.

What? Do you think that welfare mothers have enough influence to make our government go broke on their behalf?

Not in this universe, pal.

The latter half of the 19th century saw the biggest increase in living standards in human history.

Yes, thanks mostly to unionism having creating the conditions for a middle class.

And that middle class in turn created the conditions for a consumer driven economy, one which served ALL CLASSES admirable for decades.

It mystifies me why people like you want to kill the golden goose class which made all that affluence possible and give all the economic and tax benefits to the already too wealthy class.

I assume you either don't understand economics as well as you imagine you do, or your bread is buttered by that class so obviously that you fear speaking out against these idiotic policies.

At least for liberal western economies. Britain and then america went from agrarian dirt farmers to industrialized nations. The early 20th century saw a depression which was caused by the federal reserve.

The Federal reserve was established in 1913, about twenty years after the previous depression, and 16 years before the GREAT depression.

Obviously, the theory that a FEDERAL RESERVE could prevent the business cycles which cause these depressions was either completely wrong or nothing but a smokescreen to begin with. I suspect the latter, but perhaps the people running the economy then are as stupid as the people running it now.

Again, it's the federal reserve. Central planning doesn't work for wheat production in the USSR, and it doesn't work well in determining interest rates. The result is the boom/bust cycle. Artificially low interest rates send a false economic signal to investors and businessmen.

The extent to which the Federal Reserve is responsible for this latest economic downturn is this...

By making borrowed money more cheap, they made it possible for the NEW BANKING SYSTEM (the one we created by deregulating the one that actually worked pretty well) to lend more money into the real estate market than was wise.

That drove the prices of real estate higher (in relationship to incomes) than made sense.

 

[Shogun]

Eliminate lib trolls...


see how easy that is? Now how about the actual topic....

come getcha some.. there are more of us than there are of you.

 

[Shogun]

No, you take it to North Korea or Vietnam where you would like it very much.

This populist nonsense has NEVER worked in this country and never will. The vast majority of middle america has NO stomach for socialistic idiocy and will NEVER allow it to happen no matter how many kool-aide San Fransiscans or Latte drinking intellectuals in Soho may like it to. The country will NEVER be a Western Europe, we will ALWAYS be a largely supply-side economy as we have been now for much of the past 40 years...

SO it is you who should probably consider leaving because neither McCain nor Obama is going to change anything much at all just as neither Clinton nor Bush did.

make sure you tell me that same thing AFTER this election, sucker. I'll see your blathering and raise you Evidence...

Is America Losing At Globalization?
Free trade used to seem like a good thing for U.S. businesses and consumers. Now we're not so sure.
Free Trade: Is Globalization Hurting the U.S? | Newsweek Inside Business | Newsweek.com

But in this decade, rampant growth in emerging markets has mercilessly boosted prices for energy and commodities; competition from foreign workers has tamped down wage growth, and the weak dollar has made U.S. companies vulnerable to foreign buyers. "In the 1990s, we got all the upside of globalization," said David Smick, a consultant and author of the new book "The World Is Curved: Hidden Dangers in the Global Economy." "Now we're getting some of the downside."

As a result, Americans are now more inclined to see themselves as victims of globalization—rather than as beneficiaries of it. A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll this spring found that 50 percent of respondents said free trade hurt the economy, while only 26 percent said it helped.

 

[sealybobo]

There's plenty of money in the monied classes to invest.




Nice try , but I'm not buying it.

When we cut taxes on the very welathy, they have all sorts of money to invest and so they do...and then what happens?

financial Bubbles happen, that's what happens.

There's a whole LOT of investment capital chasing too few profits, that's what happens. In other words, all that spare capital ends up INFLATING THE COST OF INVESTMENTS beyond their potential worth.



Yeah, we're aalready like the most productive society on earth precsiely because we are the most captialized nation on earth (more dollars invested per worker than anyplace I know of), we're awash with STUFF already and you really think that we need more capital investment chasing the same investments that aren't making enough money because the consumer class is going broke?

THIS is the best a Doctor of Economics can come up with...a rehash of the failed trickledown theory?

Does this clown not know his history? does he not know that trickle down economic keeps failing? It failed in the late 19th century, it failed in the early twentieth century, the late 20th century, and it wil fail again in the early 21st century, too.

Too much investment capital, taken from the consumer classes, inevitably leads to the same thing over and over and over again.

It causes bubbles in markets which pop!, and then we suffer a period of slowed economic activity.

The problem isn't that the rich don't have enough capital, it's that our economy is drive by consumerism, ye over educated but apparently not very well ninny!




Finally, a glimmer of sense! Yes, cutting taxes without cutting expenses is ANOTHER EVEN WORSE KIND of mistake our Republican chumsn ahve been making for the last two decades.



Partial credit. Given the idiocy of the way we do FREE TRADE, higher taxes DO drive industry out of the nation, I quite agree.



None of us really have a clue what a free market cpaitalist society would look like.

I suspect it would look like a lot like Somalia, but hey, I could be wrong. It might look like utopia...for about three people or so.

George Reisman, Ph.D., is Pepperdine University Professor Emeritus of Economics. His web site is Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics. His blog is at George Reisman's Blog on Economics, Politics, Society, and Culture.

[/QUOTE]


I'll give a company a tax break when they hire someone. What we should not do is give EVERY RICH PERSON IN AMERICA a tax break and just hope they hire someone. That's what Bush did.

And, make healthcare free to all citizens so the companies can be more profitable. Redumblicans always want to save companies money to make them more competitive but they refuse to take healthcare off their plates.

 

[Skull Pilot]

I'll give a company a tax break when they hire someone. What we should not do is give EVERY RICH PERSON IN AMERICA a tax break and just hope they hire someone. That's what Bush did.

What do you think companies do? They hire people, give them jobs, pay social security, workers' comp, payroll and unemployment taxes, give holidays and vacations to employees.

you give companies a tax break so they will hire not after the fact. make it easier to do business not harder and the economy will grow. make it hard or impossible to do business by raising taxes and watch as businesses stop hiring and start outsourcing.

And, make healthcare free to all citizens so the companies can be more profitable. Redumblicans always want to save companies money to make them more competitive but they refuse to take healthcare off their plates.

For one companies don't pay for health care, they pay for health insurance. The answer to the problem is not to make health care free but to make health insurance more affordable.

Insurance works on the law of large numbers. the more people on the sample, the lower the costs because the overall risk is lower. the feds don't have to get involved in this at all other than to make it easier to enlarge the sample so to speak. If all small business in a town were allowed to pool their employees so instead of having 100 businesses with 50 people on insurance you basically have one set of businesses with 5000 people and the cost of insurance per person goes down considerably. that way we keep our health care system on a third party payer model without the feds getting involved.

In fact why can't a state instead of a company be the client of an insurance company? So in effect you have one client with several million employees and premiums can be collected through state sales or income taxes. or people could opt out and pay for thier own insurance. frankly I would be cheaper for example I can get health insurance for about 400 per month as a member of the CT Business Insuance Association because they allow a version of that pooling of employees i mentioned earlier. now that same coverage would cost a private citizen substantially more so the answer is easy; make it easier to be part of a large insurance group.

Still a much better and much less expensive. option than having the feds run it.

 

[Shogun]

companies will OUTSOURCE regardless of their tax burden. They don't try to reduce the cost of labor JUST BECAUSE they are bing taxed at any given rate. To suggest that it's the tax burden that causes outsourcing is pretty much the most vivid example of capitalism gone wrong.

 

[Skull Pilot]

companies will OUTSOURCE regardless of their tax burden. They don't try to reduce the cost of labor JUST BECAUSE they are bing taxed at any given rate. To suggest that it's the tax burden that causes outsourcing is pretty much the most vivid example of capitalism gone wrong.

Not all companies can outsource to other countries. And most small businesses don't. you need a global company with a global presence to do that and most businesses in the US do not have that kind of presence where investing in foreign outsourcing is possible because there still has to be oversight. And you have to make the distinction between outsourcing and outsourcing to foreign companies. I outsource payroll but it is to a local accountant not a foreign company.

 

[Shogun]

Not all companies can outsource to other countries. And most small businesses don't. you need a global company with a global presence to do that and most businesses in the US do not have that kind of presence where investing in foreign outsourcing is possible because there still has to be oversight. And you have to make the distinction between outsourcing and outsourcing to foreign companies. I outsource payroll but it is to a local accountant not a foreign company.

and it's the global companies that are looking at being served their new tax burden. It's not Jack's Bait Shop down the road. It's not Gramma's Linen and things at the local shopping mall isn't in danger of being put out of business because of taxation.


and, in the context of criticism of the liberal platform, im pretty sure we know that OUTSOURCING means taking jobs out of the country rather than outsourcing janitorial staff to Manpower.

 

[sealybobo]

What do you think companies do? They hire people, give them jobs, pay social security, workers' comp, payroll and unemployment taxes, give holidays and vacations to employees.

you give companies a tax break so they will hire not after the fact. make it easier to do business not harder and the economy will grow. make it hard or impossible to do business by raising taxes and watch as businesses stop hiring and start outsourcing.




For one companies don't pay for health care, they pay for health insurance. The answer to the problem is not to make health care free but to make health insurance more affordable.

Insurance works on the law of large numbers. the more people on the sample, the lower the costs because the overall risk is lower. the feds don't have to get involved in this at all other than to make it easier to enlarge the sample so to speak. If all small business in a town were allowed to pool their employees so instead of having 100 businesses with 50 people on insurance you basically have one set of businesses with 5000 people and the cost of insurance per person goes down considerably. that way we keep our health care system on a third party payer model without the feds getting involved.

In fact why can't a state instead of a company be the client of an insurance company? So in effect you have one client with several million employees and premiums can be collected through state sales or income taxes. or people could opt out and pay for thier own insurance. frankly I would be cheaper for example I can get health insurance for about 400 per month as a member of the CT Business Insuance Association because they allow a version of that pooling of employees i mentioned earlier. now that same coverage would cost a private citizen substantially more so the answer is easy; make it easier to be part of a large insurance group.

Still a much better and much less expensive. option than having the feds run it.

What I'm saying is that the GOP gave tax breaks to companies to get them to hire. Instead of hiring, they either let people go and sometimes moved their operations overseas. Then they got tax breaks FOR moving overseas. Yes it is true. The GOP House Ways & Means committee pre 2006 gave tax breaks to companies that were going overseas. Screw that.

By the way, I love your state insured concept! Great reply. See, i don't argue with everything everyone says. That is a great idea.

Sorry about the healthcare vs health insurance fopa. My bad. LOL. Same thing, right?

 

[indago]

sealybobo wrote:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
What I'm saying is that the GOP gave tax breaks to companies to get them to hire. Instead of hiring, they either let people go and sometimes moved their operations overseas. Then they got tax breaks FOR moving overseas. Yes it is true. The GOP House Ways & Means committee pre 2006 gave tax breaks to companies that were going overseas. Screw that.
---------------------------------------------------------------------

On the date 27 September 1992, 60 Minutes' Ed Bradley reported on the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a taxpayer funded agency that promoted the movement of manufacturing in this country to foreign lands -- El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, China, and etc. This agency actively advertised to the American companies that they could get low interest loans to close down their American manufacturing interests and establish manufacturing overseas, and at labor costs of 57 cents per hour rather than the high wages in the US.

 

[BaronVonBigmeat]

Oh poppycock and you know it.

There are supply siders whose every kneejerk response is to give tax breaks and incentives to the monied classes, and every time they bring this up they talk about how having a monied class well greased with investment capital inevitably works to everyones advantage because their investments "tickle down" to the little people.

You are now attempting to deny the basic theme (termed tickle down economics) of supply siders of which you are obviously one.

I'm not a supply-sider. They believe in tax cuts, and think that spending cuts are perhaps nice, but not necessary. This played well in Washington, where politicians want to be all things to all people. Tax rate cuts and growing spending + inflating/borrowing plays well because the benefits are easy for the voters to see, and the costs are fairly well hidden. As Keynes said, "Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."

Austrians on the other hand realize that tax cuts without corresponding spending cuts...really aren't a cut at all. You've just shifted the burden around. Society trades one form of economic pain for another. That's why I highlighted a couple parts of the article in red.

The real issue is reducing the government burden.

No shit. The question is how much money do the rich need, not do they need to be rich at all?

As I said, most of those who are "rich", are successful businessmen who started their own business and created the bulk of new jobs. I mean if you buy a decent-sized apartment complex and get it whipped into shape, you're "rich". Every dollar you tax is a dollar that the landlord can't spend on maintenance, or building another complex, or loaning to some other businessman, etc.

Our government spend such that the wealthy make even more money sucking off the government teat, sport.

Yes, of course. This is the worst aspect of our government. The wealthy who suckle off the government teat via commerce dept. subsidies and so forth should be cut off immediately. Ditto for the rich corporate farms pushing for ethanol mandates and so forth. And the war industries are certainly the worst of all.

You've just identified merchantilism or economic fascism, which is distinct from laissez faire capitalism. It's a political problem, not an economic one. Some businessmen are market entrepreneurs and get rich serving through voluntary trade. Other businessmen are political entrepreneurs, and get rich via the iron fist of the state.

The middle class paid for the social security as they went, so tallying that to the debt problem is either mendacious, or simply wrong out of ignorance.

Social security is a colossal pyramid scheme which will inevitably die. Just imagine if people got to keep their "contribution", along with the employer's half, which let's face it, comes straight out of your paycheck before you even see it. I could more than triple my savings rate, for example. And those savings could provide capital for new investments.

Yes, thanks mostly to unionism having creating the conditions for a middle class.

And that middle class in turn created the conditions for a consumer driven economy, one which served ALL CLASSES admirable for decades.

It mystifies me why people like you want to kill the golden goose class which made all that affluence possible and give all the economic and tax benefits to the already too wealthy class.

Unionism didn't create a middle class. There may have been unions during periods of economic growth, but that is not why living standards have increased.

Let's go back to the year say...1600. Before the industrial revolution. There are rich people, just like there always is. And plenty of poor people. Now if unions are the key to unlocking prosperity, all we need to do is force the rich to give up most of what they own, and the poor will be lifted into the middle class existence we have today.

Pure nonsense of course. They would still be pretty poor. You cannot bring prices down unless you increase the output of the average worker! You cannot redistribute something which doesn't exist. If a thousand workers take all day to make 100 cars, those cars simply cannot be as cheap as if the thousand workers had made 500 cars. This kind of innovation does not just magically happen, it requires investment.

Ditto for indoor plumbing, refrigeration, A/C power networks, on and on. Living standards (for society as a whole) went up because the real cost of goods went down, not because unions. People work fewer hours to afford the same goods (aside from the effect inflation has of course).

The extent to which the Federal Reserve is responsible for this latest economic downturn is this...

By making borrowed money more cheap, they made it possible for the NEW BANKING SYSTEM (the one we created by deregulating the one that actually worked pretty well) to lend more money into the real estate market than was wise.

That drove the prices of real estate higher (in relationship to incomes) than made sense.

Yes, I basically agree with this. The american government has a hardon for widespread home ownership. The tax code has steered investment towards housing, the government has prosecuted banks for "discriminating" against people with bad credit, then you've got government-supported entities like fannie mae and freddie mac buying up crap mortgages and repackaging them. And why not? Privatized profits, socialized losses. It's the american way, unfortunately. You can't halfassedly deregulate things, but then promise bailouts if they get stupid with their money.

 

[Zoomie1980]

What do you think companies do? They hire people, give them jobs, pay social security, workers' comp, payroll and unemployment taxes, give holidays and vacations to employees.

you give companies a tax break so they will hire not after the fact. make it easier to do business not harder and the economy will grow. make it hard or impossible to do business by raising taxes and watch as businesses stop hiring and start outsourcing.




For one companies don't pay for health care, they pay for health insurance. The answer to the problem is not to make health care free but to make health insurance more affordable.

Insurance works on the law of large numbers. the more people on the sample, the lower the costs because the overall risk is lower. the feds don't have to get involved in this at all other than to make it easier to enlarge the sample so to speak. If all small business in a town were allowed to pool their employees so instead of having 100 businesses with 50 people on insurance you basically have one set of businesses with 5000 people and the cost of insurance per person goes down considerably. that way we keep our health care system on a third party payer model without the feds getting involved.

In fact why can't a state instead of a company be the client of an insurance company? So in effect you have one client with several million employees and premiums can be collected through state sales or income taxes. or people could opt out and pay for thier own insurance. frankly I would be cheaper for example I can get health insurance for about 400 per month as a member of the CT Business Insuance Association because they allow a version of that pooling of employees i mentioned earlier. now that same coverage would cost a private citizen substantially more so the answer is easy; make it easier to be part of a large insurance group.

Still a much better and much less expensive. option than having the feds run it.

Hillary Clinton's Universal Health Insurance program from her primary campaign is about the only universal coverage plan that would have even a tiny chance of ever being doable because it requires MANDATORY participation by every worker in the country. No one can opt out for any reason, EVERYONE pays in, even the perfectly healthy 22 year old with no wife or dependents.

Insurance is health socialism, basically. The healthy subsidize the sick. and the only way it works is that a massive number of healthy pay for the handful of sick

 

[Zoomie1980]

sealybobo wrote:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
What I'm saying is that the GOP gave tax breaks to companies to get them to hire. Instead of hiring, they either let people go and sometimes moved their operations overseas. Then they got tax breaks FOR moving overseas. Yes it is true. The GOP House Ways & Means committee pre 2006 gave tax breaks to companies that were going overseas. Screw that.
---------------------------------------------------------------------

On the date 27 September 1992, 60 Minutes' Ed Bradley reported on the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a taxpayer funded agency that promoted the movement of manufacturing in this country to foreign lands -- El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, China, and etc. This agency actively advertised to the American companies that they could get low interest loans to close down their American manufacturing interests and establish manufacturing overseas, and at labor costs of 57 cents per hour rather than the high wages in the US.

High oil prices have dramatically reversed the trend of offshoring manufacturing. Fuel costs now exceed the payroll savings by using foreign labor. The trend since oil moved past $100 is now to start moving some manufacturing, especially those with higher shipping costs, back to domestic production. High fuel costs are seriously impacting all distributed manufacturing forcing production back to being near their major markets to mitigate shipping costs.

Ditto with offshoring of technical work. Indian Engineering and IT related discipline salaries are EXPLODING and are now blowing past 70% the us salary rate. That is almost at the breaking point of the productivity costs of moving work offshore. Depending on who you believe the break even point for using Indian tech labor is 70-75% US salary. After that, it's cheaper to pay the going rate for home grown talent. Of course, there is also the problem of not enough home grown talent to go around, thus the ever upward pressure of Tech salaries, even in a recession.