I’d be amazed if they only doubled. This is simply financially unsustainable. The government has gone completely mad.
24 thoughts on “Why Your Taxes May Double”
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I’d be amazed if they only doubled. This is simply financially unsustainable. The government has gone completely mad.
Comments are closed.
Hey – if we accept that the Republicans are to blame can we just stop the insanity?
Well, no, because once we accept that Republicans are to blame, we have do proper penance for every letting Republicans close to levers of power.
And penance requires worshipping at the Democrat Church of Green (cash, not Gaia).
No big deal. It’s not as if the global economy relies on US discretionary consumer spending or anything.
What this is really saying is that there are certain components of US government entitlement spending that are unsustainable. What will really happen is that these entitlements will be reduced in some way, probably through stealth inflation or perhaps a bold government actually cutting benefits.
The linked piece is a quote from David M. Walker, Former Comptroller General and Head of the GAO. When a commenter in another thread quoted Walker’s estimate that George W. Bush had added $32 trillion to the nation’s long-term obligations, Rand dismissed it because the quote was linked to by Andrew Sullivan. Now Rand quotes Walker approvingly.
So why might our taxes double? The answer is simple: health care costs. Health care costs dominate the long term deficit picture. Click on my name to chek out Peter Orszag’s graphs on the subject. If we rein in health care costs, there is no debt crisis. If we don’t, it doesn’t matter what we do about Social Security, defense and all the smaller items in the budget — health care costs will bankrupt us.
And why is that?
Could it be because health care isn’t even something tax dollars should be spent on in the first place?
Nah — that’s just crazy talk.
McGehee:
You’re welcome to suggest we eliminate Medicare, Medicaid, and S-CHIP (and perhaps veteran’s and military health care as well). But with health costs rising, the last thing voters want is less health care assistance for the elderly, children and the poor.
That’s too bad Jim. But maybe the voters ought to learn, assuming for some reason they haven’t already, that they can’t have everything they want for free.
But with health costs rising, the last thing voters want is less health care assistance for the elderly, children and the poor.
Except that’s what Obama and the Democrats are offering, and have made that quite explicit, so why on Earth do you spend so much of the day defending them?
Karl: We could eliminate health care entitlements for children, the elderly, and the poor. When every other industrialized country can cover all its citizens, for the richest country of all to not even its most vulnerable would be pathetic, but we could do that, and it would reduce the federal deficit.
But it wouldn’t do the economy much good, because the cost of private health care would continue to skyrocket, soaking up an increasing share of our GNP, and squeezing out more productive investments. It will be difficult to compete with other countries when we’re spending 3 or 4 times as much per-capita on health care, for results that are no better.
We need health care reform for two reasons: to provide better health care (especially to those currently uninsured or underinsured), and to control the growth of health care costs. Our current system is failing badly on both counts.
Jim, the notion that socialized medicine can be more effective and more cost effective than a properly-run market-driven plan continues to remain insane.
Rand: Socialized medicine systems that outperform every non-socialized system exist today. Your “properly-run market-driven plan” remains a fantasy.
Even if I believed you, or agreed with you (your statement is highly subjective) apparently you didn’t read what I wrote.
Rand: I read what you wrote, but with “properly-run market-driven plans” as rare as unicorns, I don’t see how it much matters.
with “properly-run market-driven plans” as rare as unicorns,
No surprise, given that the collectivists have been in charge for decades.
> Rand: Socialized medicine systems that outperform every non-socialized system exist today.
Really? Then all we need to do is open up US govt healthcare, at cost, to everyone and everyone will abandon the expensive and ineffective private system.
And just to prove that it is truly superior, let’s let folks who are in the govt system take the money that we’re spending on them today to the private system. If Jim is correct, no one will.
What? The socialized system that Jim imagines isn’t like existing US govt systems?
Okay – let’s give him free reign to fix the US govt system along with the choice outlined above. If he’s correct, that will kill the private system without a single mandate.
The Constitution limits government power, even (supposedly) against what the voters want.
Not that the “living” Constitution has been anything but a dead letter in recent decades…
Then all we need to do is open up US govt healthcare, at cost, to everyone and everyone will abandon the expensive and ineffective private system.
This is known as the “public option”, and insurance companies are lobbying furiously to keep it out of the health care reform package, precisely because they fear losing business to it.
This is known as the “public option”, and insurance companies are lobbying furiously to keep it out of the health care reform package, precisely because they fear losing business to it.
And well they should since, like most government services, it won’t be sold at “cost” but will instead be subsidized by the taxpayer. They’ll be put out of business with competition that they have to subsidize.
They’ll be put out of business with competition that they have to subsidize.
Actually it is having to compete with a giant federal risk pool, with enormous negotiating clought and a standardised paperwork frontend. The effective monopoly power doesn’t create incentives to inovate, but after all, the job is simply to take in and dispence money – recent events have shown creativity in that field is maybe not to be encouraged.
A free market only functions with good information and rational decision making. Given the inept, complex and poorly documented design of the human body, and the fundamentally irrational nature of humans in pain, a free market in health leads only to financial catastrophe.
A free market only functions with good information and rational decision making. Given the inept, complex and poorly documented design of the human body, and the fundamentally irrational nature of humans in pain, a free market in health leads only to financial catastrophe.
What free market in healthcare? Duncan, are you one of the few that buys your own healthcare?
> Actually it is having to compete with a giant federal risk pool, with enormous negotiating clought and a standardised paperwork frontend.
And yet, it isn’t better and cheaper now.
The US govt already provides half of the “insurance”, yet it costs the same as the private half.
Actual economies of scale kick it at a rather low level. Kaiser, for example, is more than big enough.
Rand:
No surprise, given that the collectivists have been in charge for decades.
You’re starting to sound like those old communists who insist that “true” communism hasn’t been tried yet….
We need health care reform for two reasons: to provide better health care (especially to those currently uninsured or underinsured), and to control the growth of health care costs. Our current system is failing badly on both counts.
The latter is much more important than the former. Need I remind you that there is no right to healthcare in the US Constititution or the respective amendments? And in the absence of reduction of healthcare costs, universal healthcare will remain an expensive fantasy.
My view is that there are numerous factors in play driving up the cost of healthcare: lack of choice in insurance plans (due to employer purchased healthcare), too much mandated healthcare coverage for insurance programs, monopolies on medical professional societies, and too much malpractice lawsuits.
As far as universal healthcare goes, I think a reasonable level is emergency room coverage (since hospitals are required to serve anyone in the emergency room anyway) along with immunizations. Anything past that is unjustified in my view unless it has a great deal of value to other parties.